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The World Set Free

by H. G. Wells · English · Gutenberg #1059 · 395,710 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The World Set Free

Author: H. G. Wells


        
Release date: February 11, 2006 [eBook #1059]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1059

Credits: Charles Keller and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD SET FREE ***

[Illustration]




The World Set Free

by H.G. Wells


We Are All Things That Make And Pass,
Striving Upon A Hidden Mission,
Out To The Open Sea.

TO
Frederick Soddy’s
‘Interpretation Of Radium’
This Story,
Which Owes Long Passages
To The Eleventh Chapter Of That Book,
Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself


Contents

 PREFACE
 PRELUDE. THE SUN SNARERS
 CHAPTER THE FIRST. THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
 CHAPTER THE SECOND. THE LAST WAR
 CHAPTER THE THIRD. THE ENDING OF WAR
 CHAPTER THE FOURTH. THE NEW PHASE
 CHAPTER THE FIFTH. THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN




PREFACE


_The World Set Free_ was written in 1913 and published early in 1914,
and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility,
stories which all turn on the possible developments in the future of
some contemporary force or group of forces. _The World Set Free_ was
written under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent
person in the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of
averting it, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how
near the crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here
it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the
reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a
prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to be
rather a slow prophet. The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for
example, beat the forecast in _Anticipations_ by about twenty years or
so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical reader’s sense of use
and wont and perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have
something to do with this dating forward of one’s main events, but in
the particular case of _The World Set Free_ there was, I think, another
motive in holding the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist
to get well forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy.
1956—or for that matter 2056—may be none too late for that crowning
revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination
of over forty years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was
fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the
opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the
British Expeditionary Force were all justified before the book had been
published six months. And the opening section of Chapter the Second
remains now, after the reality has happened, a fairly adequate
diagnosis of the essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter
the Second, Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself,
is the forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite
impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and concentrate
the enthusiasm of the armies of either side. There could be no
Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the scientific corps
muttering, ‘These old fools,’ exactly as it is here foretold.

These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far
outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest
now; the thesis that because of the development of scientific
knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are
no longer possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the
old system is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to
destroy our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is
the sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the
possible ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic
of sanity to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of
mankind. I have represented the native common sense of the French mind
and of the English mind—for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be
‘God’s Englishman’—leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort
of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school book
footnotes say, compare to-day’s newspaper. Instead of a frank and
honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German and
Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences and in their disaster,
upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva at the other end of
Switzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations (excluding the
United States, Russia, and most of the ‘subject peoples’ of the world),
meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide disregard to make impotent
gestures at the leading problems of the debacle. Either the disaster
has not been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict
the necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion.
Just as the world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and
thought that increase would go on for ever, so now it would seem the
world is growing accustomed to a steady glide towards social
disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on continually and
never come to a final bump. So soon do use and wont establish
themselves, and the most flaming and thunderous of lessons pale into
disregard.

The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question whether
it is still possible to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in
mankind, to avert this steady glide to destruction, is now one of the
most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is
temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But
he has to confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of
understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn
the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old
institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is
there any plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as
something overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that
is in the working class movement throughout the world. And labour
internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a profound
social revolution. If world peace is to be attained through labour
internationalism, it will have to be attained at the price of the
completest social and economic reconstruction and by passing through a
phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very
bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period, and may in the
end fail to achieve anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the
fact remains that it is in the labour class, and the labour class
alone, that any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so far
appeared. The dream of _The World Set Free_, a dream of highly educated
and highly favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting
themselves to the task of reshaping the world, has thus far remained a
dream.

H. G. WELLS.

EASTON GLEBE, DUNMOW, 1921.




PRELUDE
THE SUN SNARERS


Section I

The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external
power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of
his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength
and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough
implement of stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands.
Presently he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he
borrowed the carrying strength of water and the driving force of the
wind, he quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed
first with copper and then with iron, increased and varied and became
more elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and made
his way easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social
relationships and increased his efficiency by the division of labour.
He began to store up knowledge. Contrivance followed contrivance, each
making it possible for a man to do more. Always down the lengthening
record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more.... A
quarter of a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being
scarcely articulate, sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a
rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick, naked, living in small family
groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile activity
declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have
sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river
valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a
male, a few females, a child or so.

He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled
the cave-bear over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword
and spear; he froze to death upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy
with the clay that would one day make cups of porcelain; he chewed the
ear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim speculation in
his eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he
became aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his
roars the formless precursors of moral admonitions. For he was a great
individualist, that original, he suffered none other than himself.

So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of
all of us, fought and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.

Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened the
tiger’s claw age by age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the
swift grace of the horse, was at work upon him—is at work upon him
still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him were killed
soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger
brain, the better balanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements
were a little better made, the man a little more delicately adjusted to
his possibilities. He became more social; his herd grew larger; no
longer did each man kill or drive out his growing sons; a system of
taboos made them tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon
even after he was dead, and were his allies against the beasts and the
rest of mankind. (But they were forbidden to touch the women of the
tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and each
son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger of the Old
Man should be roused. All the world over, even to this day, these
ancient inevitable taboos can be traced.) And now instead of caves came
huts and hovels, and the fire was better tended and there were
wrappings and garments; and so aided, the creature spread into colder
climates, carrying food with him, storing food—until sometimes the
neglected grass-seed sprouted again and gave a first hint of
agriculture.

And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.

Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts
and his fears were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the
squatting-place and dim stirrings of speculation lit his eyes. He
scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued it and began
pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the river brink between
his fingers, and found a pleasure in its patternings and repetitions,
shaped it into the form of vessels, and found that it would hold water.
He watched the streaming river, and wondered from what bountiful breast
this incessant water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that
perhaps he might snare it and spear it as it went down to its
resting-place amidst the distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to
his brother that once indeed he had done so—at least that some one had
done so—he mixed that perhaps with another dream almost as daring, that
one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began fiction—pointing
a way to achievement—and the august prophetic procession of tales.

For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that
life of our fathers went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that
phase of human life, from the first clumsy eolith of rudely chipped
flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or three
thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by
human standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim
intimations of the beast. And that first glimmering of speculation,
that first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-eyed and
flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous
listener, gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most
marvellous beginning this world has ever seen. It doomed the mammoths,
and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch the sun.

Section 2

That dream was but a moment in a man’s life, whose proper business it
seemed was to get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner
of all that belongs to the fellowship of the beasts. About him, hidden
from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched sources of Power,
whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day, Power
that could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of
the race were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.

At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is
abundant and life very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlier
jealousies, becoming, as necessity persecuted him less urgently, more
social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger community. There
began a division of labour, certain of the older men specialised in
knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in
war, and priest and king began to develop their _rôles_ in the opening
drama of man’s history. The priest’s solicitude was seed-time and
harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a hundred
river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were
already towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They
flourished unrecorded, ignoring the past and unsuspicious of the
future, for as yet writing had still to begin.

Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth of
Power that offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain
animals, he developed his primordially haphazard agriculture into a
ritual, he added first one metal to his resources and then another,
until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to
supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled
down his river until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made
the first roads. But his chief activity for a hundred centuries and
more, was the subjugation of himself and others to larger and larger
societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external
power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses,
that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands
from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still resents association.
From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the
Peace of the World, man’s dealings were chiefly with himself and his
fellow man, trading, bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving,
conquering, exterminating, and every little increment in Power, he
turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused
elaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his
fellow men into a community of purpose became the last and greatest of
his instincts. Already before the last polished phase of the stone age
was over he had become a political animal. He made astonishingly
far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of
writing and making records, and with that his town communities began to
stretch out to dominion; in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and
the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and the first written laws
had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers
and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which
had been a barrier became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of
pirate polities came the great struggle of Carthage and Rome. The
history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up of the
Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped
Cæsar and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind.
Measured by the duration of human life it is a vast space of time
between that first dynasty in Egypt and the coming of the aeroplane,
but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is
all of it a story of yesterday.

Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period of
the warring states, while men’s minds were chiefly preoccupied by
politics and mutual aggression, their progress in the acquirement of
external Power was slow—rapid in comparison with the progress of the
old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic
discovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons
and tactics of warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their
knowledge of the habitable globe, or the devices and utensils of
domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and the days when
Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions and
changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and
then forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it
contained no steps; the peasant life was the same, there were already
priests and lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and
rulers, doctors, wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China
and Assyria and south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period,
and they were doing much the same things and living much the same life
as they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English excavators of the year
A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and
disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence
that they could read with the completest sympathy. There were great
religious and moral changes throughout the period, empires and
republics replaced one another, Italy tried a vast experiment in
slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again and again and failed and
failed and was still to be tested again and rejected again in the New
World; Christianity and Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more
specialised cults, but essentially these were progressive adaptations
of mankind to material conditions that must have seemed fixed for ever.
The idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life
would have been entirely strange to human thought through all that
time.

Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his
opportunity amidst the busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the
wars and processions, the castle building and cathedral building, the
arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable feuds, the crusades
and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculated with
the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative
explanations of everything barred his path; but he speculated with a
better brain, sat idle and gazed at circling stars in the sky and mused
upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there was a certain
leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the
assurances of orthodox belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in
the world about them, questioning the finality of scholastic wisdom.
Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this whisper had
come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinary
lives nor content themselves with the common things of this world once
they had heard this voice. And mostly they believed not only that all
this world was as it were a painted curtain before things unguessed at,
but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power had come to men by
chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among rare
and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd
utilisable thing, sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied
discovery, sometimes pretending to find. The world of every day laughed
at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and ill-treated them,
or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of
them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the
greater part heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him
who had first dreamt of attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of
his blood and descent; and the thing they sought, all unwittingly, was
the snare that will some day catch the sun.

Section 3

Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of
Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His common-place
books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the
methods of the early aviators. Dürer was his parallel and Roger
Bacon—whom the Franciscans silenced—of his kindred. Such a man again in
an earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam
nineteen hundred years before it was first brought into use. And
earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse, and still earlier the
legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history
whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers
appeared. And half the alchemists were of their tribe.

When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have
supposed that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. But
they could see nothing of the sort. They were not yet beginning to
think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too poor to make such
engines even had they thought of them. For a time they could not make
instruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough a
purpose as hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of coopered
timber, and the world waited for more than five hundred years before
the explosive engine came.

Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the
world could use their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious
purposes. If man in general was not still as absolutely blind to the
unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor, he was at
best purblind.

Section 4

The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the
verge of discovery, before they began to influence human lives.

There were no doubt many such devices as Hero’s toys devised and
forgotten, time after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that
coal should be mined and burning with plenty of iron at hand before it
dawned upon men that here was something more than a curiosity. And it
is to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of
steam was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is
proposed to fire shot out of corked iron bottles full of heated water.
The mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron upon a larger scale
than men had ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the
steam-engine and the steam-boat, followed one another in an order that
had a kind of logical necessity. It is the most interesting and
instructive chapter in the history of the human intelligence, the
history of steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to
the perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the
utilisation of intra-molecular power. Nearly every human being must
have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many thousands of years; the
women in particular were always heating water, boiling it, seeing it
boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with its fury; millions of
people at different times must have watched steam pitching rocks out of
volcanoes like cricket balls and blowing pumice into foam, and yet you
may search the whole human record through, letters, books,
inscriptions, pictures, for any glimmer of a realisation that here was
force, here was strength to borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke
up to it, the railways spread like a network over the globe, the ever
enlarging iron steamships began their staggering fight against wind and
wave.

Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of
the Age of Energy that was to close the long history of the Warring
States.

But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty.
They would not recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything
fundamental had happened to their immemorial necessities. They called
the steam-engine the ‘iron horse’ and pretended that they had made the
most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory production
were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production,
population was streaming steadily in from the country-side and
concentrating in hitherto unthought-of masses about a few city centres,
food was coming to them over enormous distances upon a scale that made
the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a petty
incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western
Asia and America was in Progress, and—nobody seems to have realised
that something new had come into human life, a strange swirl different
altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the
swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of
accumulating water and eddying inactivity....

The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit
at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from
Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New
Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance
at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices
current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa,
Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the
place of his father’s eight) that he thought the world changed very
little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old
school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few
scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and
all would be well with them....

Section 5

Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be
studied, invaded the common life of men a few decades after the
exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in spite of its provocative
nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly blind for incalculable
ages. Could anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity
for attention? It thundered at man’s ears, it signalled to him in
blinding flashes, occasionally it killed him, and he could not see it
as a thing that concerned him enough to merit study. It came into the
house with the cat on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever
he stroked her fur. It rotted his metals when he put them together....
There is no single record that any one questioned why the cat’s fur
crackles or why hair is so unruly to brush on a frosty day, before the
sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have done his very
successful best not to think about it at all; until this new spirit of
the Seeker turned itself to these things.

How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant,
before the speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was
Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth’s court physician, who first puzzled his
brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and shellac, and so
began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this
universal presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a
mere little group of curious facts for nearly two hundred years,
connected perhaps with magnetism—a mere guess that—perhaps with the
lightning. Frogs’ legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron
railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them.
Except for the lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert
before electricity stepped out of the cabinet of scientific curiosities
into the life of the common man.... Then suddenly, in the half-century
between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over
traction, it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished
distance with the perfected wireless telephone and the
telephotograph....

Section 6

And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and
invention for at least a hundred years after the scientific revolution
had begun. Each new thing made its way into practice against a
scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One writer upon these
subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened, he
says, in the year 1898, within ten years, that is to say, of the time
when the first aviators were fairly on the wing. He tells us how he sat
at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy.

His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak very
seriously to his father, and as he was a kindly little boy he did not
want to do it too harshly.

This is what happened.

‘I wish, Daddy,’ he said, coming to his point, ‘that you wouldn’t write
all this stuff about flying. The chaps rot me.’

‘Yes!’ said his father.

‘And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots me.’

‘But there is going to be flying—quite soon.’

The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.
‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t write about it.’

‘You’ll fly—lots of times—before you die,’ the father assured him.

The little boy looked unhappy.

The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred
and under-developed photograph. ‘Come and look at this,’ he said.

The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and a
meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like
object with flat wings on either side of it. It was the first record of
the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained itself in the
air by mechanical force. Across the margin was written: ‘Here we go up,
up, up—from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.’

The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son.
‘Well?’ he said.

‘That,’ said the schoolboy, after reflection, ‘is only a model.’

‘Model to-day, man to-morrow.’

The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he
believed quite firmly to be omniscience. ‘But old Broomie,’ he said,
‘he told all the boys in his class only yesterday, “no man will ever
fly.” No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the
wing would ever believe anything of the sort....’

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father’s
reminiscences.

Section 7

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in
the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that
man had at last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam
that scalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about the
sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a culminating exercise of his
intelligence and his intellectual courage. The air of ‘Nunc Dimittis’
sounds in same of these writings. ‘The great things are discovered,’
wrote Gerald Brown in his summary of the nineteenth century. ‘For us
there remains little but the working out of detail.’ The spirit of the
seeker was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,
unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people even
then could have realised that Science was still but the flimsiest of
trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No one seems to have
been afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there had
been but a score or so of seekers, there were many thousands, and for
one needle of speculation that had been probing the curtain of
appearances in 1800, there were now hundreds. And already Chemistry,
which had been content with her atoms and molecules for the better part
of a century, was preparing herself for that vast next stride that was
to revolutionise the whole life of man from top to bottom.

One realises how crude was the science of that time when one considers
the case of the composition of air. This was determined by that strange
genius and recluse, that man of mystery, that disembowelled
intelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the eighteenth
century. So far as he was concerned the work was admirably done. He
separated all the known ingredients of the air with a precision
altogether remarkable; he even put it upon record that he had some
doubt about the purity of the nitrogen. For more than a hundred years
his determination was repeated by chemists all the world over, his
apparatus was treasured in London, he became, as they used to say,
‘classic,’ and always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of
his experiment, that sly element argon was hiding among the nitrogen
(and with a little helium and traces of other substances, and indeed
all the hints that might have led to the new departures of the
twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped unobserved
through the professorial fingers that repeated his procedure.

Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to the
very dawn of the twentieth-century scientific discovery was still
rather a procession of happy accidents than an orderly conquest of
nature?

Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world.
Even the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful who grew
up to feel wonder and curiosity about the secrets of nature in the
nineteenth century, there were now, at the beginning of the twentieth,
myriads escaping from the limitations of intellectual routine and the
habitual life, in Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in
China, and all about the world.

It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be called
by a whole generation of scientific men, ‘the greatest of European
chemists,’ were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole
and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he was already
distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to
understand. He had been particularly attracted by the mystery of
phosphorescence and its apparent unrelatedness to every other source of
light. He was to tell afterwards in his reminiscences how he watched
the fireflies drifting and glowing among the dark trees in the garden
of the villa under the warm blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and
kept them in cages, dissected them, first studying the general anatomy
of insects very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the
effect of various gases and varying temperature upon their light. Then
the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by Sir William
Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium particles
impinge upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous, induced him to
associate the two sets of phenomena. It was a happy association for his
inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate thing, too, that any one with
the mathematical gift should have been taken by these curiosities.

Section 8

And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at Fiesole, a
certain professor of physics named Rufus was giving a course of
afternoon lectures upon Radium and Radio-Activity in Edinburgh. They
were lectures that had attracted a very considerable amount of
attention. He gave them in a small lecture-theatre that had become more
and more congested as his course proceeded. At his concluding
discussion it was crowded right up to the ceiling at the back, and
there people were standing, standing without any sense of fatigue, so
fascinating did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular,
a chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging his
knee with great sand-red hands and drinking in every word, eyes aglow,
cheeks flushed, and ears burning.

‘And so,’ said the professor, ‘we see that this Radium, which seemed at
first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was most
established and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really at
one with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and forcibly what
probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible
slowness. It is like the single voice crying aloud that betrays the
silent breathing multitude in the darkness. Radium is an element that
is breaking up and flying to pieces. But perhaps all elements are doing
that at less perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium—the stuff
of this incandescent gas mantle—certainly is; actinium. I feel that we
are but beginning the list. And we know now that the atom, that once we
thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final
and—lifeless—lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy. That is
the most wonderful thing about all this work. A little while ago we
thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid building
material, as substantial matter, as unit masses of lifeless stuff, and
behold! these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the
intensest force. This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium
oxide; that is to say, about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It
is worth about a pound. And in this bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in
the atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much energy as we
could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a word, in
one instant I could suddenly release that energy here and now it would
blow us and everything about us to fragments; if I could turn it into
the machinery that lights this city, it could keep Edinburgh brightly
lit for a week. But at present no man knows, no man has an inkling of
how this little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of its
store. It does release it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium
changes into radium, the radium changes into a gas called the radium
emanation, and that again to what we call radium A, and so the process
goes on, giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the
last stage of all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead.
But we cannot hasten it.’

‘I take ye, man,’ whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red hands
tightening like a vice upon his knee. ‘I take ye, man. Go on! Oh, go
on!’

The professor went on after a little pause. ‘Why is the change
gradual?’ he asked. ‘Why does only a minute fraction of the radium
disintegrate in any particular second? Why does it dole itself out so
slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the uranium change to radium
and all the radium change to the next lowest thing at once? Why this
decay by driblets; why not a decay _en masse?_ . . . Suppose presently
we find it is possible to quicken that decay?’

The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable idea
was coming. He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed in his seat
with excitement. ‘Why not?’ he echoed, ‘why not?’

The professor lifted his forefinger.

‘Given that knowledge,’ he said, ‘mark what we should be able to do! We
should not only be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only
should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in
his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of
battleships, or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but
we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the
process of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is
still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of
solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of
concentrated force. Do you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these
things would mean for us?’

The scrub head nodded. ‘Oh! go on. Go on.’

‘It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to
the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the
brute. We stand to-day towards radio-activity as our ancestor stood
towards fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a
strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the
volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is
that we know radio-activity to-day. This—this is the dawn of a new day
in human living. At the climax of that civilisation which had its
beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just
when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be
borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover
suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilisation. The energy we
need for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so
grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all
about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but——’

He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear
him.

‘——we will.’

He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.

‘And then,’ he said....

‘Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to
live on the bare surplus of Nature’s energies will cease to be the lot
of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilisation to the
beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and gentlemen, to
express the vision of man’s material destiny that opens out before me.
I see the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer
wildernesses of ice, the whole world once more Eden. I see the power of
man reach out among the stars....’

He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor or
orator might have envied.

The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds,
sighed, became audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal.
More light was turned on and what had been a dim mass of figures became
a bright confusion of movement. Some of the people signalled to
friends, some crowded down towards the platform to examine the
lecturer’s apparatus and make notes of his diagrams. But the
chuckle-headed lad with the scrub hair wanted no such detailed
frittering away of the thoughts that had inspired him. He wanted to be
alone with them; he elbowed his way out almost fiercely, he made
himself as angular and bony as a cow, fearing lest some one should
speak to him, lest some one should invade his glowing sphere of
enthusiasm.

He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who sees
visions. He had arms disproportionately long, and ridiculous big feet.

He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of
commonness, of everyday life.

He made his way to the top of Arthur’s Seat, and there he sat for a
long time in the golden evening sunshine, still, except that ever and
again he whispered to himself some precious phrase that had stuck in
his mind.

‘If,’ he whispered, ‘if only we could pick that lock....’

The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn of its
beams, a globe of ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks of cloud
that would presently engulf it.

‘Eh!’ said the youngster. ‘Eh!’

He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red sun
was there before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without
intelligence, and then with a gathering recognition. Into his mind came
a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a Stone Age
savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two hundred thousand
years ago.

‘Ye auld thing,’ he said—and his eyes were shining, and he made a kind
of grabbing gesture with his hand; ‘ye auld red thing.... We’ll have ye
_yet_.’




CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY


Section I

The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as
Ramsay, Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth
century, the problem of inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements
and so tapping the internal energy of atoms, was solved by a wonderful
combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so soon as the
year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its first
subjugation to human purpose measured little more than a quarter of a
century. For twenty years after that, indeed, minor difficulties
prevented any striking practical application of his success, but the
essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human
progress was crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in
a minute particle of bismuth; it exploded with great violence into a
heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which disintegrated in its turn in
the course of seven days, and it was only after another year’s work
that he was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid
release of energy was gold. But the thing was done—at the cost of a
blistered chest and an injured finger, and from the moment when the
invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and rending energy,
Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow and
dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power. He recorded as
much in the strange diary biography he left the world, a diary that was
up to that particular moment a mass of speculations and calculations,
and which suddenly became for a space an amazingly minute and human
record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.

He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but
none the less vividly for that, a record of the twenty-four hours
following the demonstration of the correctness of his intricate tracery
of computations and guesses. ‘I thought I should not sleep,’ he
writes—the words he omitted are supplied in brackets—(on account of)
‘pain in (the) hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done....
Slept like a child.’

He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to
do, he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to
go up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy
as a breezy playground. He went up by the underground tube that was
then the recognised means of travel from one part of London to another,
and walked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open heath. He
found it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of
house-wreckers. The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow,
steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it
commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
Neo-Georgian æstheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity
that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat of
current civilisation, saw these changes with regret. He had come up
Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the
little shops, spent hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, and
marvelled at the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westward
bank of that old gully of a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all
these familiar things gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief
from this choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged
upon the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at least,
was very much as it used to be.

There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right of
him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble, the
white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its portico still
stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue view to Harrow Hill
and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees and shining waters and
wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the opening of a great window to
the ascending Londoner. All that was very reassuring. There was the
same strolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle of motors dodging
through it harmlessly, escaping headlong into the country from the
Sabbatical stuffiness behind and below them. There was a band still, a
women’s suffrage meeting—for the suffrage women had won their way back
to the tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again—socialist
orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic
with the gladness of their one blessed weekly release from the back
yard and the chain. And away along the road to the Spaniards strolled a
vast multitude, saying, as ever, that the view of London was
exceptionally clear that day.

Young Holsten’s face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectation
of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an
under-exercised body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to
go to the left of it or the right, and again at the fork of the roads.
He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and every now and then he would
get in the way of people on the footpath or be jostled by them because
of the uncertainty of his movements. He felt, he confesses, ‘inadequate
to ordinary existence.’ He seemed to himself to be something inhuman
and mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous,
fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead—a week
of work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading—and he had
launched something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held
their contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. ‘Felt like
an imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a
Crêche,’ he notes.

He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history now
knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holsten
walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawson
to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday. They sat down at a
little table outside the County Council house of Golders Hill Park and
sent one of the waiters to the Bull and Bush for a couple of bottles of
beer, no doubt at Lawson’s suggestion. The beer warmed Holsten’s rather
dehumanised system. He began to tell Lawson as clearly as he could to
what his great discovery amounted. Lawson feigned attention, but indeed
he had neither the knowledge nor the imagination to understand. ‘In the
end, before many years are out, this must eventually change war,
transit, lighting, building, and every sort of manufacture, even
agriculture, every material human concern——’

Then Holsten stopped short. Lawson had leapt to his feet. ‘Damn that
dog!’ cried Lawson. ‘Look at it now. Hi! Here! _Phewoo-phewoo-phewoo!_
Come _here, Bobs!_ Come _here!_’

The young scientific man, with his bandaged hand, sat at the green
table, too tired to convey the wonder of the thing he had sought so
long, his friend whistled and bawled for his dog, and the Sunday people
drifted about them through the spring sunshine. For a moment or so
Holsten stared at Lawson in astonishment, for he had been too intent
upon what he had been saying to realise how little Lawson had attended.

Then he remarked, ‘_Well!_’ and smiled faintly, and—finished the
tankard of beer before him.

Lawson sat down again. ‘One must look after one’s dog,’ he said, with a
note of apology. ‘What was it you were telling me?’

Section 2

In the evening Holsten went out again. He walked to Saint Paul’s
Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the evening
service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way of the
fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through the evening lights to
Westminster. He was oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of
the immense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that
night that he ought not to publish his results, that they were
premature, that some secret association of wise men should take care of
his work and hand it on from generation to generation until the world
was riper for its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the
thousands of people he passed had really awakened to the fact of
change, they trusted the world for what it was, not to alter too
rapidly, to respect their trusts, their assurances, their habits, their
little accustomed traffics and hard-won positions.

He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging,
brightly-lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down
on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people next to him.
It was the talk of a young couple evidently on the eve of marriage. The
man was congratulating himself on having regular employment at last;
‘they like me,’ he said, ‘and I like the job. If I work up—in’r dozen
years or so I ought to be gettin’ somethin’ pretty comfortable. That’s
the plain sense of it, Hetty. There ain’t no reason whatsoever why we
shouldn’t get along very decently—very decently indeed.’

The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So it
struck upon Holsten’s mind. He added in his diary, ‘I had a sense of
all this globe as that....’

By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated
world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high
roads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland
pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great
circles of the ocean, its time-tables and appointments and payments and
dues as it were one unified and progressive spectacle. Sometimes such
visions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great generalisations and
yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively
than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming
sphere moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately
swiftness on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living
progress that altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little
deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal
circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities
and recurrencies of the human routine. The remoter past of wandering
savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw
only day and night, seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births
and deaths, walks in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter
fireside, the ancient sequence of hope and acts and age perennially
renewed, eddying on for ever and ever, save that now the impious hand
of research was raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming,
habitual, sunlit spinning-top of man’s existence....

For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famine
and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind,
failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in terms
of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed their
inglorious outlook and improbable contentments. ‘I had a sense of all
this globe as that.’

His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time
in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this
disconcerting idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose
wanderer from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained
unnatural excursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath
the fair surfaces of life. Man had not been always thus; the instincts
and desires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his
nature; also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting
curiosity, an insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed
he had tilled the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers,
grinding his corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so
long but that he was still full of restless stirrings.

‘If there have been home and routine and the field,’ thought Holsten,
‘there have also been wonder and the sea.’

He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the great
hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and colour
and stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean simply more of
that? . . .

He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing tram-car,
laden with warm light, against the deep blues of evening, dripping and
trailing long skirts of shining reflection; he crossed the Embankment
and stood for a time watching the dark river and turning ever and again
to the lit buildings and bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable
replacements of all those clustering arrangements....

‘It has begun,’ he writes in the diary in which these things are
recorded. ‘It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot
foresee. I am a part, not a whole; I am a little instrument in the
armoury of Change. If I were to burn all these papers, before a score
of years had passed, some other man would be doing this. . .

Section 3

Holsten, before he died, was destined to see atomic energy dominating
every other source of power, but for some years yet a vast network of
difficulties in detail and application kept the new discovery from any
effective invasion of ordinary life. The path from the laboratory to
the workshop is sometimes a tortuous one; electro-magnetic radiations
were known and demonstrated for twenty years before Marconi made them
practically available, and in the same way it was twenty years before
induced radio-activity could be brought to practical utilisation. The
thing, of course, was discussed very much, more perhaps at the time of
its discovery than during the interval of technical adaptation, but
with very little realisation of the huge economic revolution that
impended. What chiefly impressed the journalists of 1933 was the
production of gold from bismuth and the realisation albeit upon
unprofitable lines of the alchemist’s dreams; there was a considerable
amount of discussion and expectation in that more intelligent section
of the educated publics of the various civilised countries which
followed scientific development; but for the most part the world went
about its business—as the inhabitants of those Swiss villages which
live under the perpetual threat of overhanging rocks and mountains go
about their business—just as though the possible was impossible, as
though the inevitable was postponed for ever because it was delayed.

It was in 1953 that the first Holsten-Roberts engine brought induced
radio-activity into the sphere of industrial production, and its first
general use was to replace the steam-engine in electrical generating
stations. Hard upon the appearance of this came the Dass-Tata
engine—the invention of two among the brilliant galaxy of Bengali
inventors the modernisation of Indian thought was producing at this
time—which was used chiefly for automobiles, aeroplanes, waterplanes,
and such-like, mobile purposes. The American Kemp engine, differing
widely in principle but equally practicable, and the Krupp-Erlanger
came hard upon the heels of this, and by the autumn of 1954 a gigantic
replacement of industrial methods and machinery was in progress all
about the habitable globe. Small wonder was this when the cost, even of
these earliest and clumsiest of atomic engines, is compared with that
of the power they superseded. Allowing for lubrication the Dass-Tata
engine, once it was started cost a penny to run thirty-seven miles, and
added only nine and quarter pounds to the weight of the carriage it
drove. It made the heavy alcohol-driven automobile of the time
ridiculous in appearance as well as preposterously costly. For many
years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been
clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem
a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this
stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world’s
roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armoured monsters
that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful
decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways
thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel.
At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the relatively
enormous power for weight of the atomic engine, it was at last possible
to add Redmayne’s ingenious helicopter ascent and descent engine to the
vertical propeller that had hitherto been the sole driving force of the
aeroplane without overweighting the machine, and men found themselves
possessed of an instrument of flight that could hover or ascend or
descend vertically and gently as well as rush wildly through the air.
The last dread of flying vanished. As the journalists of the time
phrased it, this was the epoch of the Leap into the Air. The new atomic
aeroplane became indeed a mania; every one of means was frantic to
possess a thing so controllable, so secure and so free from the dust
and danger of the road, and in France alone in the year 1943 thirty
thousand of these new aeroplanes were manufactured and licensed, and
soared humming softly into the sky.

And with an equal speed atomic engines of various types invaded
industrialism. The railways paid enormous premiums for priority in the
delivery of atomic traction engines, atomic smelting was embarked upon
so eagerly as to lead to a number of disastrous explosions due to
inexperienced handling of the new power, and the revolutionary
cheapening of both materials and electricity made the entire
reconstruction of domestic buildings a matter merely dependent upon a
reorganisation of the methods of the builder and the house-furnisher.
Viewed from the side of the new power and from the point of view of
those who financed and manufactured the new engines and material it
required the age of the Leap into the Air was one of astonishing
prosperity. Patent-holding companies were presently paying dividends of
five or six hundred per cent. and enormous fortunes were made and
fantastic wages earned by all who were concerned in the new
developments. This prosperity was not a little enhanced by the fact
that in both the Dass-Tata and Holsten-Roberts engines one of the
recoverable waste products was gold—the former disintegrated dust of
bismuth and the latter dust of lead—and that this new supply of gold
led quite naturally to a rise in prices throughout the world.

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding
flight of happy and fortunate rich people—every great city was as if a
crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing—was the bright side of the
opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that
brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a
vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of
values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering
new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of
dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were
indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out
when the world sinks towards twilight and the night. Between these high
lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were
manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount
of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal
miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or
under-skilled labourers in innumerable occupations, were being flung
out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the
rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at
every centre of population, the value of existing house property had
become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all
the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping
and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of
feverish panic;—this was the reverse of the spectacle, these were the
black and monstrous under-consequences of the Leap into the Air.

There is a story of a demented London stockbroker running out into
Threadneedle Street and tearing off his clothes as he ran. ‘The Steel
Trust is scrapping the whole of its plant,’ he shouted. ‘The State
Railways are going to scrap all their engines. Everything’s going to be
scrapped—everything. Come and scrap the mint, you fellows, come and
scrap the mint!’

In the year 1955 the suicide rate for the United States of America
quadrupled any previous record. There was an enormous increase also in
violent crime throughout the world. The thing had come upon an
unprepared humanity; it seemed as though human society was to be
smashed by its own magnificent gains.

For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been no
attempt anywhere even to compute the probable dislocations this flood
of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs. The world in
these days was not really governed at all, in the sense in which
government came to be understood in subsequent years. Government was a
treaty, not a design; it was forensic, conservative, disputatious,
unseeing, unthinking, uncreative; throughout the world, except where
the vestiges of absolutism still sheltered the court favourite and the
trusted servant, it was in the hands of the predominant caste of
lawyers, who had an enormous advantage in being the only trained caste.
Their professional education and every circumstance in the manipulation
of the fantastically naïve electoral methods by which they clambered to
power, conspired to keep them contemptuous of facts, conscientiously
unimaginative, alert to claim and seize advantages and suspicious of
every generosity. Government was an obstructive business of energetic
fractions, progress went on outside of and in spite of public
activities, and legislation was the last crippling recognition of needs
so clamorous and imperative and facts so aggressively established as to
invade even the dingy seclusions of the judges and threaten the very
existence of the otherwise inattentive political machine.

The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty,
in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything
necessary to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realise
such will and purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at
hand, one has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion,
conflict, and incoherent suffering. There was no scheme for the
distribution of this vast new wealth that had come at last within the
reach of men; there was no clear conception that any such distribution
was possible. As one attempts a comprehensive view of those opening
years of the new age, as one measures it against the latent achievement
that later years have demonstrated, one begins to measure the
blindness, the narrowness, the insensate unimaginative individualism of
the pre-atomic time. Under this tremendous dawn of power and freedom,
under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science
standing like some bountiful goddess over all the squat darknesses of
human life, holding patiently in her strong arms, until men chose to
take them, security, plenty, the solution of riddles, the key of the
bravest adventures, in her very presence, and with the earnest of her
gifts in court, the world was to witness such things as the squalid
spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent litigation.

There in a stuffy court in London, a grimy oblong box of a room, during
the exceptional heat of the May of 1956, the leading counsel of the day
argued and shouted over a miserable little matter of more royalties or
less and whether the Dass-Tata company might not bar the
Holsten-Roberts’ methods of utilising the new power. The Dass-Tata
people were indeed making a strenuous attempt to secure a world
monopoly in atomic engineering. The judge, after the manner of those
times, sat raised above the court, wearing a preposterous gown and a
foolish huge wig, the counsel also wore dirty-looking little wigs and
queer black gowns over their usual costume, wigs and gowns that were
held to be necessary to their pleading, and upon unclean wooden benches
stirred and whispered artful-looking solicitors, busily scribbling
reporters, the parties to the case, expert witnesses, interested
people, and a jostling confusion of subpoenaed persons, briefless young
barristers (forming a style on the most esteemed and truculent
examples) and casual eccentric spectators who preferred this pit of
iniquity to the free sunlight outside. Every one was damply hot, the
examining King’s Counsel wiped the perspiration from his huge,
clean-shaven upper lip; and into this atmosphere of grasping contention
and human exhalations the daylight filtered through a window that was
manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a double pew to the left of the
judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen into an
ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the would-be omnivorous Dass,
under cross-examination....

Holsten had always been accustomed to publish his results so soon as
they appeared to him to be sufficiently advanced to furnish a basis for
further work, and to that confiding disposition and one happy flash of
adaptive invention the alert Dass owed his claim....

But indeed a vast multitude of such sharp people were clutching,
patenting, pre-empting, monopolising this or that feature of the new
development, seeking to subdue this gigantic winged power to the
purposes of their little lusts and avarice. That trial is just one of
innumerable disputes of the same kind. For a time the face of the world
festered with patent legislation. It chanced, however, to have one
oddly dramatic feature in the fact that Holsten, after being kept
waiting about the court for two days as a beggar might have waited at a
rich man’s door, after being bullied by ushers and watched by
policemen, was called as a witness, rather severely handled by counsel,
and told not to ‘quibble’ by the judge when he was trying to be
absolutely explicit.

The judge scratched his nose with a quill pen, and sneered at Holsten’s
astonishment round the corner of his monstrous wig. Holsten was a great
man, was he? Well, in a law-court great men were put in their places.

‘We want to know has the plaintiff added anything to this or hasn’t
he?’ said the judge, ‘we don’t want to have your views whether Sir
Philip Dass’s improvements were merely superficial adaptations or
whether they were implicit in your paper. No doubt—after the manner of
inventors—you think most things that were ever likely to be discovered
are implicit in your papers. No doubt also you think too that most
subsequent additions and modifications are merely superficial.
Inventors have a way of thinking that. The law isn’t concerned with
that sort of thing. The law has nothing to do with the vanity of
inventors. The law is concerned with the question whether these patent
rights have the novelty the plantiff claims for them. What that
admission may or may not stop, and all these other things you are
saying in your overflowing zeal to answer more than the questions
addressed to you—none of these things have anything whatever to do with
the case in hand. It is a matter of constant astonishment to me in this
court to see how you scientific men, with all your extraordinary claims
to precision and veracity, wander and wander so soon as you get into
the witness-box. I know no more unsatisfactory class of witness. The
plain and simple question is, has Sir Philip Dass made any real
addition to existing knowledge and methods in this matter or has he
not? We don’t want to know whether they were large or small additions
nor what the consequences of your admission may be. That you will leave
to us.’

Holsten was silent.

‘Surely?’ said the judge, almost pityingly.

‘No, he hasn’t,’ said Holsten, perceiving that for once in his life he
must disregard infinitesimals.

‘Ah!’ said the judge, ‘now why couldn’t you say that when counsel put
the question? . . .’

An entry in Holsten’s diary-autobiography, dated five days later, runs:
‘Still amazed. The law is the most dangerous thing in this country. It
is hundreds of years old. It hasn’t an idea. The oldest of old bottles
and this new wine, the most explosive wine. Something will overtake
them.’

Section 4

There was a certain truth in Holsten’s assertion that the law was
‘hundreds of years old.’ It was, in relation to current thought and
widely accepted ideas, an archaic thing. While almost all the material
and methods of life had been changing rapidly and were now changing
still more rapidly, the law-courts and the legislatures of the world
were struggling desperately to meet modern demands with devices and
procedures, conceptions of rights and property and authority and
obligation that dated from the rude compromises of relatively barbaric
times. The horse-hair wigs and antic dresses of the British judges,
their musty courts and overbearing manners, were indeed only the
outward and visible intimations of profounder anachronisms. The legal
and political organisation of the earth in the middle twentieth century
was indeed everywhere like a complicated garment, outworn yet strong,
that now fettered the governing body that once it had protected.

Yet that same spirit of free-thinking and outspoken publication that in
the field of natural science had been the beginning of the conquest of
nature, was at work throughout all the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries preparing the spirit of the new world within the degenerating
body of the old. The idea of a greater subordination of individual
interests and established institutions to the collective future, is
traceable more and more clearly in the literature of those times, and
movement after movement fretted itself away in criticism of and
opposition to first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and
political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley, with
no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established rulers of the
world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas and suggestions that
was known as Socialism, and more particularly its international side,
feeble as it was in creative proposals or any method of transition,
still witnesses to the growth of a conception of a modernised system of
inter-relationships that should supplant the existing tangle of
proprietary legal ideas.

The word ‘Sociology’ was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular writer
upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the middle of the
nineteenth century, but the idea of a state, planned as an
electric-traction system is planned, without reference to pre-existing
apparatus, upon scientific lines, did not take a very strong hold upon
the popular imagination of the world until the twentieth century. Then,
the growing impatience of the American people with the monstrous and
socially paralysing party systems that had sprung out of their absurd
electoral arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called
the ‘Modern State’ movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in
America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the thought of
bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property, employment,
education, and government, than had ever been contemplated before. No
doubt these Modern State ideas were very largely the reflection upon
social and political thought of the vast revolution in material things
that had been in progress for two hundred years, but for a long time
they seemed to be having no more influence upon existing institutions
than the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the
time of the death of the latter. They were fermenting in men’s minds,
and it needed only just such social and political stresses as the
coming of the atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward
abruptly into crude and startling realisation.

Section 5

Frederick Barnet’s _Wander Jahre_ is one of those autobiographical
novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the
twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand
Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal
sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the
_Wilhelm Meister_ of Goethe, a century and a half earlier.

Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history of his
life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third birthdays.
He was neither a very original nor a very brilliant man, but he had a
trick of circumstantial writing; and though no authentic portrait was
to survive for the information of posterity, he betrays by a score of
casual phrases that he was short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a
‘rather blobby’ face, and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He
belonged until the financial _débâcle_ of 1956 to the class of fairly
prosperous people, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy
and then had a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air
to Greece and Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany. His
family fortunes, which were largely invested in bank shares, coal
mines, and house property, were destroyed. Reduced to penury, he sought
to earn a living. He suffered great hardship, and was then caught up by
the war and had a year of soldiering, first as an officer in the
English infantry and then in the army of pacification. His book tells
all these things so simply and at the same time so explicitly, that it
remains, as it were, an eye by which future generations may have at
least one man’s vision of the years of the Great Change.

And he was, he tells us, a ‘Modern State’ man ‘by instinct’ from the
beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and
laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long and
delicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the Thames
opposite the ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such thought was
interwoven with the very fabric of that pioneer school in the
educational renascence in England. After the customary exchange years
in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into the classical school of London
University. The older so-called ‘classical’ education of the British
pedagogues, probably the most paralysing, ineffective, and foolish
routine that ever wasted human life, had already been swept out of this
great institution in favour of modern methods; and he learnt Greek and
Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so that he
wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an unconscious ease in
his study of the foundation civilisations of the European system to
which they were the key. (This change was still so recent that he
mentions an encounter in Rome with an ‘Oxford don’ who ‘spoke Latin
with a Wiltshire accent and manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters
with his tongue out, and seemed to think a Greek sentence a charm when
it was a quotation and an impropriety when it wasn’t.’)

Barnet saw the last days of the coal-steam engines upon the English
railways and the gradual cleansing of the London atmosphere as the
smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to electric heating. The
building of laboratories at Kensington was still in progress, and he
took part in the students’ riots that delayed the removal of the Albert
Memorial. He carried a banner with ‘We like Funny Statuary’ on one
side, and on the other ‘Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our
Great Departed Stand in the Rain?’ He learnt the rather athletic
aviation of those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he
was fined for flying over the new prison for political libellers at
Wormwood Scrubs, ‘in a manner calculated to exhilarate the prisoners
while at exercise.’ That was the time of the attempted suppression of
any criticism of the public judicature and the place was crowded with
journalists who had ventured to call attention to the dementia of Chief
Justice Abrahams. Barnet was not a very good aviator, he confesses he
was always a little afraid of his machine—there was excellent reason
for every one to be afraid of those clumsy early types—and he never
attempted steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records,
owned one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity
and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the museum of
machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running over a dog and
complains of the ruinous price of ‘spatchcocks’ in Surrey.
‘Spatchcocks,’ it seems, was a slang term for crushed hens.

He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military service to
a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or technical
qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that handicapped his
aviation indicated the infantry of the line as his sphere of training.
That was the most generalised form of soldiering. The development of
the theory of war had been for some decades but little assisted by any
practical experience. What fighting had occurred in recent years, had
been fighting in minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric
soldiers and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the
great powers of the world were content for the most part to maintain
armies that sustained in their broader organisation the traditions of
the European wars of thirty and forty years before. There was the
infantry arm to which Barnet belonged and which was supposed to fight
on foot with a rifle and be the main portion of the army. There were
cavalry forces (horse soldiers), having a ratio to the infantry that
had been determined by the experiences of the Franco-German war in
1871. There was also artillery, and for some unexplained reason much of
this was still drawn by horses; though there were also in all the
European armies a small number of motor-guns with wheels so constructed
that they could go over broken ground. In addition there were large
developments of the engineering arm, concerned with motor transport,
motor-bicycle scouting, aviation, and the like.

No first-class intelligence had been sought to specialise in and work
out the problem of warfare with the new appliances and under modern
conditions, but a succession of able jurists, Lord Haldane, Chief
Justice Briggs, and that very able King’s Counsel, Philbrick, had
reconstructed the army frequently and thoroughly and placed it at last,
with the adoption of national service, upon a footing that would have
seemed very imposing to the public of 1900. At any moment the British
Empire could now put a million and a quarter of arguable soldiers upon
the board of Welt-Politik. The traditions of Japan and the Central
European armies were more princely and less forensic; the Chinese still
refused resolutely to become a military power, and maintained a small
standing army upon the American model that was said, so far as it went,
to be highly efficient, and Russia, secured by a stringent
administration against internal criticism, had scarcely altered the
design of a uniform or the organisation of a battery since the opening
decades of the century. Barnet’s opinion of his military training was
manifestly a poor one, his Modern State ideas disposed him to regard it
as a bore, and his common sense condemned it as useless. Moreover, his
habit of body made him peculiarly sensitive to the fatigues and
hardships of service.

‘For three days in succession we turned out before dawn and—for no
earthly reason—without breakfast,’ he relates. ‘I suppose that is to
show us that when the Day comes the first thing will be to get us
thoroughly uncomfortable and rotten. We then proceeded to Kriegspiel,
according to the mysterious ideas of those in authority over us. On the
last day we spent three hours under a hot if early sun getting over
eight miles of country to a point we could have reached in a motor
omnibus in nine minutes and a half—I did it the next day in that—and
then we made a massed attack upon entrenchments that could have shot us
all about three times over if only the umpires had let them. Then came
a little bayonet exercise, but I doubt if I am sufficiently a barbarian
to stick this long knife into anything living. Anyhow in this battle I
shouldn’t have had a chance. Assuming that by some miracle I hadn’t
been shot three times over, I was far too hot and blown when I got up
to the entrenchments even to lift my beastly rifle. It was those others
would have begun the sticking....

‘For a time we were watched by two hostile aeroplanes; then our own
came up and asked them not to, and—the practice of aerial warfare still
being unknown—they very politely desisted and went away and did dives
and circles of the most charming description over the Fox Hills.’

All Barnet’s accounts of his military training were written in the same
half-contemptuous, half-protesting tone. He was of opinion that his
chances of participating in any real warfare were very slight, and
that, if after all he should participate, it was bound to be so
entirely different from these peace manœuvres that his only course as a
rational man would be to keep as observantly out of danger as he could
until he had learnt the tricks and possibilities of the new conditions.
He states this quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham
heroics.

Section 6

Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest of
masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some
time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new possibilities with
the financial troubles of his family. ‘I knew my father was worried,’
he admits. That cast the smallest of shadows upon his delighted
departure for Italy and Greece and Egypt with three congenial
companions in one of the new atomic models. They flew over the Channel
Isles and Touraine, he mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc—‘These
new helicopters, we found,’ he notes, ‘had abolished all the danger and
strain of sudden drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were
liable’—and then he went on by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and
Athens, to visit the pyramids by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo,
and to follow the Nile up to Khartum. Even by later standards, it must
have been a very gleeful holiday for a young man, and it made the
tragedy of his next experiences all the darker. A week after his return
his father, who was a widower, announced himself ruined, and committed
suicide by means of an unscheduled opiate.

At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing, spending,
enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with no calling by
which he could earn a living. He tried teaching and some journalism,
but in a little while he found himself on the underside of a world in
which he had always reckoned to live in the sunshine. For innumerable
men such an experience has meant mental and spiritual destruction, but
Barnet, in spite of his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed
himself when put to the test, of the more valiant modern quality. He
was saturated with the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were
already dawning, and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly
as his appointed material, and turned them to expression.

Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. ‘I might have lived
and died,’ he says, ‘in that neat fool’s paradise of secure lavishness
above there. I might never have realised the gathering wrath and sorrow
of the ousted and exasperated masses. In the days of my own prosperity
things had seemed to me to be very well arranged.’ Now from his new
point of view he was to find they were not arranged at all; that
government was a compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes,
and law a convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak,
though they had many negligent masters, had few friends.

‘I had thought things were looked after,’ he wrote. ‘It was with a kind
of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved—and found that no one
in particular cared.’

He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.

‘It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady—she was a needy widow,
poor soul, and I was already in her debt—to keep an old box for me in
which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and the like. She lived in
great fear of the Public Health and Morality Inspectors, because she
was sometimes too poor to pay the customary tip to them, but at last
she consented to put it in a dark tiled place under the stairs, and
then I went forth into the world—to seek first the luck of a meal and
then shelter.’

He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in which a
year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.

London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of visible
smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine, had already
ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the Victorian time; it
had been, and indeed was, constantly being rebuilt, and its main
streets were already beginning to take on those characteristics that
distinguished them throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.
The insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had been banished from
the roadway, which was now of a resilient, glass-like surface,
spotlessly clean; and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow
vestige of the ancient footpath on either side of the track and
forbidden at the risk of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway.
People descended from their automobiles upon this pavement and went
through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways for
pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front of the houses at the
level of the first story, and, being joined by frequent bridges, gave
the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian appearance. In some
streets there were upper and even third-story Rows. For most of the day
and all night the shop windows were lit by electric light, and many
establishments had made, as it were, canals of public footpaths through
their premises in order to increase their window space.

Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively since
the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour Card of any
indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to show he was in
employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement below.

But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet’s
appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too, had
other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to reach the
galleries about Leicester Square—that great focus of London life and
pleasure.

He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the centre
was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights and connected
with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath which hummed the
interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating as the current
alternated between east and west and north and south. Above rose great
frontages of intricate rather than beautiful reinforced porcelain,
studded with lights, barred by bold illuminated advertisements, and
glowing with reflections. There were the two historical music halls of
this place, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal
players revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare’s plays,
and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment whose
pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night. The south
side of the square was in dark contrast to the others; it was still
being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars surmounted by the frozen
gestures of monstrous cranes rose over the excavated sites of vanished
Victorian buildings.

This framework attracted Barnet’s attention for a time to the exclusion
of other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a dead rigidity, a
stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it and all its machinery was
quiet; but the constructor’s globes of vacuum light filled its every
interstice with a quivering green moonshine and showed alert but
motionless—soldier sentinels!

He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck that
day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have doubled the
individual efficiency and halved the number of steel workers.

‘Shouldn’t wonder if they didn’t get chucking bombs,’ said Barnet’s
informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his way to the
Alhambra music hall.

Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at the
corners of the square. Something very sensational had been flashed upon
the transparencies. Forgetting for a moment his penniless condition, he
made his way over a bridge to buy a paper, for in those days the
papers, which were printed upon thin sheets of metallic foil, were sold
at determinate points by specially licensed purveyors. Half over, he
stopped short at a change in the traffic below; and was astonished to
see that the police signals were restricting vehicles to the half
roadway. When presently he got within sight of the transparencies that
had replaced the placards of Victorian times, he read of the Great
March of the Unemployed that was already in progress through the West
End, and so without expenditure he was able to understand what was
coming.

He watched, and his book describes this procession which the police had
considered it unwise to prevent and which had been spontaneously
organised in imitation of the Unemployed Processions of earlier times.
He had expected a mob but there was a kind of sullen discipline about
the procession when at last it arrived. What seemed for a time an
unending column of men marched wearily, marched with a kind of
implacable futility, along the roadway underneath him. He was, he says,
moved to join them, but instead he remained watching. They were a
dingy, shabby, ineffective-looking multitude, for the most part
incapable of any but obsolete and superseded types of labour. They bore
a few banners with the time-honoured inscription: ‘Work, not Charity,’
but otherwise their ranks were unadorned.

They were not singing, they were not even talking, there was nothing
truculent nor aggressive in their bearing, they had no definite
objective they were just marching and showing themselves in the more
prosperous parts of London. They were a sample of that great mass of
unskilled cheap labour which the now still cheaper mechanical powers
had superseded for evermore. They were being ‘scrapped’—as horses had
been ‘scrapped.’

Barnet leant over the parapet watching them, his mind quickened by his
own precarious condition. For a time, he says, he felt nothing but
despair at the sight; what should be done, what could be done for this
gathering surplus of humanity? They were so manifestly useless—and
incapable—and pitiful.

What were they asking for?

They had been overtaken by unexpected things. Nobody had foreseen——

It flashed suddenly into his mind just what the multitudinous shambling
enigma below meant. It was an appeal against the unexpected, an appeal
to those others who, more fortunate, seemed wiser and more powerful,
for something—for _intelligence_. This mute mass, weary footed, rank
following rank, protested its persuasion that some of these others must
have foreseen these dislocations—that anyhow they ought to have
foreseen—and arranged.

That was what this crowd of wreckage was feeling and seeking so dumbly
to assert.

‘Things came to me like the turning on of a light in a darkened room,’
he says. ‘These men were praying to their fellow creatures as once they
prayed to God! The last thing that men will realise about anything is
that it is inanimate. They had transferred their animation to mankind.
They still believed there was intelligence somewhere, even if it was
careless or malignant.... It had only to be aroused to be
conscience-stricken, to be moved to exertion.... And I saw, too, that
as yet _there was no such intelligence_. The world waits for
intelligence. That intelligence has still to be made, that will for
good and order has still to be gathered together, out of scraps of
impulse and wandering seeds of benevolence and whatever is fine and
creative in our souls, into a common purpose. It’s something still to
come....’

It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not
very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been
altogether occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities,
should be able to stand there and generalise about the needs of the
race.

But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time there was
already dawning the light of a new era. The spirit of humanity was
escaping, even then it was escaping, from its extreme imprisonment in
individuals. Salvation from the bitter intensities of self, which had
been a conscious religious end for thousands of years, which men had
sought in mortifications, in the wilderness, in meditation, and by
innumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the effect of
naturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into their
unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and
everyday acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the
spirit of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of
those ancient and instinctive preoccupations from which the very threat
of hell and torment had failed to drive them. And this young man,
homeless and without provision even for the immediate hours, in the
presence of social disorganisation, distress, and perplexity, in a
blazing wilderness of thoughtless pleasure that blotted out the stars,
could think as he tells us he thought.

‘I saw life plain,’ he wrote. ‘I saw the gigantic task before us, and
the very splendour of its intricate and immeasurable difficulty filled
me with exaltation. I saw that we have still to discover government,
that we have still to discover education, which is the necessary
reciprocal of government, and that all this—in which my own little
speck of a life was so manifestly overwhelmed—this and its yesterday in
Greece and Rome and Egypt were nothing, the mere first dust swirls of
the beginning, the movements and dim murmurings of a sleeper who will
presently be awake....’

Section 7

And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descent
from this ecstatic vision of reality.

‘Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and a
little hungry.’

He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood upon
the Thames Embankment. He made his way through the galleries of the
booksellers and the National Gallery, which had been open continuously
day and night to all decently dressed people now for more than twelve
years, and across the rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the
hotel colonnade to the Embankment. He had long known of these admirable
offices, which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the
casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he would,
as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for food and a
night’s lodgings and some indication of possible employment.

But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got
to the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and
besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for a time on
the outskirts of the waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and
then he became aware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of
people, up through the arches of the great buildings that had arisen
when all the railway stations were removed to the south side of the
river, and so to the covered ways of the Strand. And here, in the open
glare of midnight, he found unemployed men begging, and not only
begging, but begging with astonishing assurance, from the people who
were emerging from the small theatres and other such places of
entertainment which abounded in that thoroughfare.

This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no begging in
London streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the police
were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were
invading those well-kept quarters of the town. They had become stonily
blind to anything but manifest disorder.

Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed
his bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for
twice he says that he was begged from. Near the Trafalgar Square
gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was
walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness.

‘I’m starving,’ he said to her abruptly.

‘Oh! poor dear!’ she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her
kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand....

It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might
under the repressive social legislation of those times, have brought
Barnet within reach of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses,
and thanked her as well as he was able, and went off very gladly to get
food.

Section 8

A day or so later—and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the
roads may be taken as a mark of increasing social disorganisation and
police embarrassment—he wandered out into the open country. He speaks
of the roads of that plutocratic age as being ‘fenced with barbed wire
against unpropertied people,’ of the high-walled gardens and trespass
warnings that kept him to the dusty narrowness of the public ways. In
the air, happy rich people were flying, heedless of the misfortunes
about them, as he himself had been flying two years ago, and along the
road swept the new traffic, light and swift and wonderful. One was
rarely out of earshot of its whistles and gongs and siren cries even in
the field paths or over the open downs. The officials of the labour
exchanges were everywhere overworked and infuriated, the casual wards
were so crowded that the surplus wanderers slept in ranks under sheds
or in the open air, and since giving to wayfarers had been made a
punishable offence there was no longer friendship or help for a man
from the rare foot passenger or the wayside cottage....

‘I wasn’t angry,’ said Barnet. ‘I saw an immense selfishness, a
monstrous disregard for anything but pleasure and possession in all
those people above us, but I saw how inevitable that was, how certainly
if the richest had changed places with the poorest, that things would
have been the same. What else can happen when men use science and every
new thing that science gives, and all their available intelligence and
energy to manufacture wealth and appliances, and leave government and
education to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago? Those
traditions come from the dark ages when there was really not enough for
every one, when life was a fierce struggle that might be masked but
could not be escaped. Of course this famine grabbing, this fierce
dispossession of others, must follow from such a disharmony between
material and training. Of course the rich were vulgar and the poor grew
savage and every added power that came to men made the rich richer and
the poor less necessary and less free. The men I met in the casual
wards and the relief offices were all smouldering for revolt, talking
of justice and injustice and revenge. I saw no hope in that talk, nor
in anything but patience....’

But he did not mean a passive patience. He meant that the method of
social reconstruction was still a riddle, that no effectual
rearrangement was possible until this riddle in all its tangled aspects
was solved. ‘I tried to talk to those discontented men,’ he wrote, ‘but
it was hard for them to see things as I saw them. When I talked of
patience and the larger scheme, they answered, “But then we shall all
be dead”—and I could not make them see, what is so simple to my own
mind, that that did not affect the question. Men who think in lifetimes
are of no use to statesmanship.’

He does not seem to have seen a newspaper during those wanderings, and
a chance sight of the transparency of a kiosk in the market-place at
Bishop’s Stortford announcing a ‘Grave International Situation’ did not
excite him very much. There had been so many grave international
situations in recent years.

This time it was talk of the Central European powers suddenly attacking
the Slav Confederacy, with France and England going to the help of the
Slavs.

But the next night he found a tolerable meal awaiting the vagrants in
the casual ward, and learnt from the workhouse master that all
serviceable trained men were to be sent back on the morrow to their
mobilisation centres. The country was on the eve of war. He was to go
back through London to Surrey. His first feeling, he records, was one
of extreme relief that his days of ‘hopeless battering at the underside
of civilisation’ were at an end. Here was something definite to do,
something definitely provided for. But his relief was greatly modified
when he found that the mobilisation arrangements had been made so
hastily and carelessly that for nearly thirty-six hours at the
improvised depôt at Epsom he got nothing either to eat or to drink but
a cup of cold water. The depôt was absolutely unprovisioned, and no one
was free to leave it.




CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE LAST WAR


Section I

Viewed from the standpoint of a sane and ambitious social order, it is
difficult to understand, and it would be tedious to follow, the motives
that plunged mankind into the war that fills the histories of the
middle decades of the twentieth century.

It must always be remembered that the political structure of the world
at that time was everywhere extraordinarily behind the collective
intelligence. That is the central fact of that history. For two hundred
years there had been no great changes in political or legal methods and
pretensions, the utmost change had been a certain shifting of
boundaries and slight readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every
other aspect of life there had been fundamental revolutions, gigantic
releases, and an enormous enlargement of scope and outlook. The
absurdities of courts and the indignities of representative
parliamentary government, coupled with the opening of vast fields of
opportunity in other directions, had withdrawn the best intelligences
more and more from public affairs. The ostensible governments of the
world in the twentieth century were following in the wake of the
ostensible religions. They were ceasing to command the services of any
but second-rate men. After the middle of the eighteenth century there
are no more great ecclesiastics upon the world’s memory, after the
opening of the twentieth no more statesmen. Everywhere one finds an
energetic, ambitious, short-sighted, common-place type in the seats of
authority, blind to the new possibilities and litigiously reliant upon
the traditions of the past.

Perhaps the most dangerous of those outworn traditions were the
boundaries of the various ‘sovereign states,’ and the conception of a
general predominance in human affairs on the part of some one
particular state. The memory of the empires of Rome and Alexander
squatted, an unlaid carnivorous ghost, in the human imagination—it
bored into the human brain like some grisly parasite and filled it with
disordered thoughts and violent impulses. For more than a century the
French system exhausted its vitality in belligerent convulsions, and
then the infection passed to the German-speaking peoples who were the
heart and centre of Europe, and from them onward to the Slavs. Later
ages were to store and neglect the vast insane literature of this
obsession, the intricate treaties, the secret agreements, the infinite
knowingness of the political writer, the cunning refusals to accept
plain facts, the strategic devices, the tactical manœuvres, the records
of mobilisations and counter-mobilisations. It ceased to be credible
almost as soon as it ceased to happen, but in the very dawn of the new
age their state craftsmen sat with their historical candles burning,
and, in spite of strange, new reflections and unfamiliar lights and
shadows, still wrangling and planning to rearrange the maps of Europe
and the world.

It was to become a matter for subtle inquiry how far the millions of
men and women outside the world of these specialists sympathised and
agreed with their portentous activities. One school of psychologists
inclined to minimise this participation, but the balance of evidence
goes to show that there were massive responses to these suggestions of
the belligerent schemer. Primitive man had been a fiercely combative
animal; innumerable generations had passed their lives in tribal
warfare, and the weight of tradition, the example of history, the
ideals of loyalty and devotion fell in easily enough with the
incitements of the international mischief-maker. The political ideas of
the common man were picked up haphazard, there was practically nothing
in such education as he was given that was ever intended to fit him for
citizenship as such (that conception only appeared, indeed, with the
development of Modern State ideas), and it was therefore a
comparatively easy matter to fill his vacant mind with the sounds and
fury of exasperated suspicion and national aggression.

For example, Barnet describes the London crowd as noisily patriotic
when presently his battalion came up from the depôt to London, to
entrain for the French frontier. He tells of children and women and
lads and old men cheering and shouting, of the streets and rows hung
with the flags of the Allied Powers, of a real enthusiasm even among
the destitute and unemployed. The Labour Bureaux were now partially
transformed into enrolment offices, and were centres of hotly patriotic
excitement. At every convenient place upon the line on either side of
the Channel Tunnel there were enthusiastic spectators, and the feeling
in the regiment, if a little stiffened and darkened by grim
anticipations, was none the less warlike.

But all this emotion was the fickle emotion of minds without
established ideas; it was with most of them, Barnet says, as it was
with himself, a natural response to collective movement, and to martial
sounds and colours, and the exhilarating challenge of vague dangers.
And people had been so long oppressed by the threat of and preparation
for war that its arrival came with an effect of positive relief.

Section 2

The plan of campaign of the Allies assigned the defence of the lower
Meuse to the English, and the troop-trains were run direct from the
various British depôts to the points in the Ardennes where they were
intended to entrench themselves.

Most of the documents bearing upon the campaign were destroyed during
the war, from the first the scheme of the Allies seems to have been
confused, but it is highly probable that the formation of an aerial
park in this region, from which attacks could be made upon the vast
industrial plant of the lower Rhine, and a flanking raid through
Holland upon the German naval establishments at the mouth of the Elbe,
were integral parts of the original project. Nothing of this was known
to such pawns in the game as Barnet and his company, whose business it
was to do what they were told by the mysterious intelligences at the
direction of things in Paris, to which city the Whitehall staff had
also been transferred. From first to last these directing intelligences
remained mysterious to the body of the army, veiled under the name of
‘Orders.’ There was no Napoleon, no Cæsar to embody enthusiasm. Barnet
says, ‘We talked of Them. _They_ are sending us up into Luxembourg.
_They_ are going to turn the Central European right.’

Behind the veil of this vagueness the little group of more or less
worthy men which constituted Headquarters was beginning to realise the
enormity of the thing it was supposed to control....

In the great hall of the War Control, whose windows looked out across
the Seine to the Trocadero and the palaces of the western quarter, a
series of big-scale relief maps were laid out upon tables to display
the whole seat of war, and the staff-officers of the control were
continually busy shifting the little blocks which represented the
contending troops, as the reports and intelligence came drifting in to
the various telegraphic bureaux in the adjacent rooms. In other smaller
apartments there were maps of a less detailed sort, upon which, for
example, the reports of the British Admiralty and of the Slav
commanders were recorded as they kept coming to hand. Upon these maps,
as upon chessboards, Marshal Dubois, in consultation with General Viard
and the Earl of Delhi, was to play the great game for world supremacy
against the Central European powers. Very probably he had a definite
idea of his game; very probably he had a coherent and admirable plan.

But he had reckoned without a proper estimate either of the new
strategy of aviation or of the possibilities of atomic energy that
Holsten had opened for mankind. While he planned entrenchments and
invasions and a frontier war, the Central European generalship was
striking at the eyes and the brain. And while, with a certain diffident
hesitation, he developed his gambit that night upon the lines laid down
by Napoleon and Moltke, his own scientific corps in a state of mutinous
activity was preparing a blow for Berlin. ‘These old fools!’ was the
key in which the scientific corps was thinking.

The War Control in Paris, on the night of July the second, was an
impressive display of the paraphernalia of scientific military
organisation, as the first half of the twentieth century understood it.
To one human being at least the consulting commanders had the likeness
of world-wielding gods.

She was a skilled typist, capable of nearly sixty words a minute, and
she had been engaged in relay with other similar women to take down
orders in duplicate and hand them over to the junior officers in
attendance, to be forwarded and filed. There had come a lull, and she
had been sent out from the dictating room to take the air upon the
terrace before the great hall and to eat such scanty refreshment as she
had brought with her until her services were required again.

From her position upon the terrace this young woman had a view not only
of the wide sweep of the river below her, and all the eastward side of
Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to Saint Cloud, great blocks and masses
of black or pale darkness with pink and golden flashes of illumination
and endless interlacing bands of dotted lights under a still and
starless sky, but also the whole spacious interior of the great hall
with its slender pillars and gracious arching and clustering lamps was
visible to her. There, over a wilderness of tables, lay the huge maps,
done on so large a scale that one might fancy them small countries; the
messengers and attendants went and came perpetually, altering, moving
the little pieces that signified hundreds and thousands of men, and the
great commander and his two consultants stood amidst all these things
and near where the fighting was nearest, scheming, directing. They had
but to breathe a word and presently away there, in the world of
reality, the punctual myriads moved. Men rose up and went forward and
died. The fate of nations lay behind the eyes of these three men.
Indeed they were like gods.

Most godlike of the three was Dubois. It was for him to decide; the
others at most might suggest. Her woman’s soul went out to this grave,
handsome, still, old man, in a passion of instinctive worship.

Once she had taken words of instruction from him direct. She had
awaited them in an ecstasy of happiness—and fear. For her exaltation
was made terrible by the dread that some error might dishonour her....

She watched him now through the glass with all the unpenetrating
minuteness of an impassioned woman’s observation.

He said little, she remarked. He looked but little at the maps. The
tall Englishman beside him was manifestly troubled by a swarm of ideas,
conflicting ideas; he craned his neck at every shifting of the little
red, blue, black, and yellow pieces on the board, and wanted to draw
the commander’s attention to this and that. Dubois listened, nodded,
emitted a word and became still again, brooding like the national
eagle.

His eyes were so deeply sunken under his white eyebrows that she could
not see his eyes; his moustache overhung the mouth from which those
words of decision came. Viard, too, said little; he was a dark man with
a drooping head and melancholy, watchful eyes. He was more intent upon
the French right, which was feeling its way now through Alsace to the
Rhine. He was, she knew, an old colleague of Dubois; he knew him
better, she decided, he trusted him more than this unfamiliar
Englishman....

Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in profile;
these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To seem
to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry—itself a
confession of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules,
Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been
a promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man,
deliberate but ready. Even then men had looked at him and said: ‘He
will go far.’ Through fifty years of peace he had never once been found
wanting, and at manœuvres his impassive persistence had perplexed and
hypnotised and defeated many a more actively intelligent man. Deep in
his soul Dubois had hidden his one profound discovery about the modern
art of warfare, the key to his career. And this discovery was that
_nobody knew_, that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk was
to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and above
all silently, had the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile one fed
the men. Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious
unknowns of the Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great
flank march through Holland, with all the British submarines and
hydroplanes and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it;
Viard might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes,
and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon Vienna;
the thing was to listen—and wait for the other side to begin
experimenting. It was all experimenting. And meanwhile he remained in
profile, with an air of assurance—like a man who sits in an automobile
after the chauffeur has had his directions.

And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet face,
that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence. The clustering lights
threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps, great bunches of him,
versions of a commanding presence, lighter or darker, dominated the
field, and pointed in every direction. Those shadows symbolised his
control. When a messenger came from the wireless room to shift this or
that piece in the game, to replace under amended reports one Central
European regiment by a score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute
this or that force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and
seem not to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who
approves a pupil’s self-correction. ‘Yes, that’s better.’

How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how wonderful it
all was. This was the brain of the western world, this was Olympus with
the warring earth at its feet. And he was guiding France, France so
long a resentful exile from imperialism, back to her old predominance.

It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be
privileged to participate....

It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal
devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual. She
must control herself....

She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when the
war would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this harshness,
this armour would be put aside and the gods might unbend. Her eyelids
drooped....

She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night
outside was no longer still. That there was an excitement down below on
the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering of searchlights
among the clouds from some high place away beyond the Trocadero. And
then the excitement came surging up past her and invaded the hall
within.

One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of the
room, gesticulating and shouting something.

And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn’t
understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed machinery
and cables of the ways beneath, were beating—as pulses beat. And about
her blew something like a wind—a wind that was dismay.

Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child might
look towards its mother.

He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but that
was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand gauntly
gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too manifestly
disposed to drag him towards the great door that opened on the terrace.
And Viard was hurrying towards the huge windows and doing so in the
strangest of attitudes, bent forward and with eyes upturned.

Something up there?

And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.

The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against the
masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping down through
the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two of them, there had
already started curling trails of red....

Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through moments
that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl down towards
her.

She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but
a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing
sound. Every other light had gone out about her and against this glare
hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of
cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She
had an impression of a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a
maddened living thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly
amidst a chaos of falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the
earth furiously, that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing
rabbit....

She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.

She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that a
little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She tried to
raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She was not clear
whether it was night or day nor where she was; she made a second
effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and got into a sitting
position and looked about her.

Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of a vast
uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing had been
destroyed.

At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous experience.

She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a
world of heaped broken things. And it was lit—and somehow this was more
familiar to her mind than any other fact about her—by a flickering,
purplish-crimson light. Then close to her, rising above a confusion of
_débris_, she recognised the Trocadero; it was changed, something had
gone from it, but its outline was unmistakable. It stood out against a
streaming, whirling uprush of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled
Paris and the Seine and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful,
luminous organisation of the War Control....

She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she lay,
and examined her surroundings with an increasing understanding....

The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the river.
Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water, from which
these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps of vapour came
into circling existence a foot or so from its mirror-surface. Near at
hand and reflected exactly in the water was the upper part of a
familiar-looking stone pillar. On the side of her away from the water
the heaped ruins rose steeply in a confused slope up to a glaring
crest. Above and reflecting this glare towered pillowed masses of steam
rolling swiftly upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the
livid glow that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind
connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War Control.

‘_Mais!_’ she whispered, and remained with staring eyes quite
motionless for a time, crouching close to the warm earth.

Then presently this dim, broken human thing began to look about it
again. She began to feel the need of fellowship. She wanted to
question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate her experience. And her
foot hurt her atrociously. There ought to be an ambulance. A little
gust of querulous criticisms blew across her mind. This surely was a
disaster! Always after a disaster there should be ambulances and
helpers moving about....

She craned her head. There was something there. But everything was so
still!

‘_Monsieur!_’ she cried. Her ears, she noted, felt queer, and she began
to suspect that all was not well with them.

It was terribly lonely in this chaotic strangeness, and perhaps this
man—if it was a man, for it was difficult to see—might for all his
stillness be merely insensible. He might have been stunned....

The leaping glare beyond sent a ray into his corner and for a moment
every little detail was distinct. It was Marshal Dubois. He was lying
against a huge slab of the war map. To it there stuck and from it there
dangled little wooden objects, the symbols of infantry and cavalry and
guns, as they were disposed upon the frontier. He did not seem to be
aware of this at his back, he had an effect of inattention, not
indifferent attention, but as if he were thinking....

She could not see the eyes beneath his shaggy brows, but it was evident
he frowned. He frowned slightly, he had an air of not wanting to be
disturbed. His face still bore that expression of assured confidence,
that conviction that if things were left to him France might obey in
security....

She did not cry out to him again, but she crept a little nearer. A
strange surmise made her eyes dilate. With a painful wrench she pulled
herself up so that she could see completely over the intervening lumps
of smashed-up masonry. Her hand touched something wet, and after one
convulsive movement she became rigid.

It was not a whole man there; it was a piece of a man, the head and
shoulders of a man that trailed down into a ragged darkness and a pool
of shining black....

And even as she stared the mound above her swayed and crumbled, and a
rush of hot water came pouring over her. Then it seemed to her that she
was dragged downward....

Section 3

When the rather brutish young aviator with the bullet head and the
black hair close-cropped _en brosse_, who was in charge of the French
special scientific corps, heard presently of this disaster to the War
Control, he was so wanting in imagination in any sphere but his own,
that he laughed. Small matter to him that Paris was burning. His mother
and father and sister lived at Caudebec; and the only sweetheart he had
ever had, and it was poor love-making then, was a girl in Rouen. He
slapped his second-in-command on the shoulder. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘there’s
nothing on earth to stop us going to Berlin and giving them
tit-for-tat.... Strategy and reasons of state—they’re over.... Come
along, my boy, and we’ll just show these old women what we can do when
they let us have our heads.’

He spent five minutes telephoning and then he went out into the
courtyard of the chateau in which he had been installed and shouted for
his automobile. Things would have to move quickly because there was
scarcely an hour and a half before dawn. He looked at the sky and noted
with satisfaction a heavy bank of clouds athwart the pallid east.

He was a young man of infinite shrewdness, and his material and
aeroplanes were scattered all over the country-side, stuck away in
barns, covered with hay, hidden in woods. A hawk could not have
discovered any of them without coming within reach of a gun. But that
night he only wanted one of the machines, and it was handy and quite
prepared under a tarpaulin between two ricks not a couple of miles
away; he was going to Berlin with that and just one other man. Two men
would be enough for what he meant to do....

He had in his hands the black complement to all those other gifts
science was urging upon unregenerate mankind, the gift of destruction,
and he was an adventurous rather than a sympathetic type....

He was a dark young man with something negroid about his gleaming face.
He smiled like one who is favoured and anticipates great pleasures.
There was an exotic richness, a chuckling flavour, about the voice in
which he gave his orders, and he pointed his remarks with the long
finger of a hand that was hairy and exceptionally big.

‘We’ll give them tit-for-tat,’ he said. ‘We’ll give them tit-for-tat.
No time to lose, boys....’

And presently over the cloud-banks that lay above Westphalia and Saxony
the swift aeroplane, with its atomic engine as noiseless as a dancing
sunbeam and its phosphorescent gyroscopic compass, flew like an arrow
to the heart of the Central European hosts.

It did not soar very high; it skimmed a few hundred feet above the
banked darknesses of cumulus that hid the world, ready to plunge at
once into their wet obscurities should some hostile flier range into
vision. The tense young steersman divided his attention between the
guiding stars above and the level, tumbled surfaces of the vapour
strata that hid the world below. Over great spaces those banks lay as
even as a frozen lava-flow and almost as still, and then they were rent
by ragged areas of translucency, pierced by clear chasms, so that dim
patches of the land below gleamed remotely through abysses. Once he saw
quite distinctly the plan of a big railway station outlined in lamps
and signals, and once the flames of a burning rick showing livid
through a boiling drift of smoke on the side of some great hill. But if
the world was masked it was alive with sounds. Up through that vapour
floor came the deep roar of trains, the whistles of horns of
motor-cars, a sound of rifle fire away to the south, and as he drew
near his destination the crowing of cocks....

The sky above the indistinct horizons of this cloud sea was at first
starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to east as the
dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the blue, and the lesser
stars vanished. The face of the adventurer at the steering-wheel,
darkly visible ever and again by the oval greenish glow of the compass
face, had something of that firm beauty which all concentrated purpose
gives, and something of the happiness of an idiot child that has at
last got hold of the matches. His companion, a less imaginative type,
sat with his legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which
contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs
that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had
ever seen in action. Hitherto Carolinum, their essential substance, had
been tested only in almost infinitesimal quantities within steel
chambers embedded in lead. Beyond the thought of great destruction
slumbering in the black spheres between his legs, and a keen resolve to
follow out very exactly the instructions that had been given him, the
man’s mind was a blank. His aquiline profile against the starlight
expressed nothing but a profound gloom.

The sky below grew clearer as the Central European capital was
approached.

So far they had been singularly lucky and had been challenged by no
aeroplanes at all. The frontier scouts they must have passed in the
night; probably these were mostly under the clouds; the world was wide
and they had had luck in not coming close to any soaring sentinel.
Their machine was painted a pale gray, that lay almost invisibly over
the cloud levels below. But now the east was flushing with the near
ascent of the sun, Berlin was but a score of miles ahead, and the luck
of the Frenchmen held. By imperceptible degrees the clouds below
dissolved....

Away to the north-eastward, in a cloudless pool of gathering light and
with all its nocturnal illuminations still blazing, was Berlin. The
left finger of the steersman verified roads and open spaces below upon
the mica-covered square of map that was fastened by his wheel. There in
a series of lake-like expansions was the Havel away to the right; over
by those forests must be Spandau; there the river split about the
Potsdam island; and right ahead was Charlottenburg cleft by a great
thoroughfare that fell like an indicating beam of light straight to the
imperial headquarters. There, plain enough, was the Thiergarten; beyond
rose the imperial palace, and to the right those tall buildings, those
clustering, beflagged, bemasted roofs, must be the offices in which the
Central European staff was housed. It was all coldly clear and
colourless in the dawn.

He looked up suddenly as a humming sound grew out of nothing and became
swiftly louder. Nearly overhead a German aeroplane was circling down
from an immense height to challenge him. He made a gesture with his
left arm to the gloomy man behind and then gripped his little wheel
with both hands, crouched over it, and twisted his neck to look upward.
He was attentive, tightly strung, but quite contemptuous of their
ability to hurt him. No German alive, he was assured, could outfly him,
or indeed any one of the best Frenchmen. He imagined they might strike
at him as a hawk strikes, but they were men coming down out of the
bitter cold up there, in a hungry, spiritless, morning mood; they came
slanting down like a sword swung by a lazy man, and not so rapidly but
that he was able to slip away from under them and get between them and
Berlin. They began challenging him in German with a megaphone when they
were still perhaps a mile away. The words came to him, rolled up into a
mere blob of hoarse sound. Then, gathering alarm from his grim silence,
they gave chase and swept down, a hundred yards above him perhaps, and
a couple of hundred behind. They were beginning to understand what he
was. He ceased to watch them and concentrated himself on the city
ahead, and for a time the two aeroplanes raced....

A bullet came tearing through the air by him, as though some one was
tearing paper. A second followed. Something tapped the machine.

It was time to act. The broad avenues, the park, the palaces below
rushed widening out nearer and nearer to them. ‘Ready!’ said the
steersman.

The gaunt face hardened to grimness, and with both hands the
bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it
against the side. It was a black sphere two feet in diameter. Between
its handles was a little celluloid stud, and to this he bent his head
until his lips touched it. Then he had to bite in order to let the air
in upon the inducive. Sure of its accessibility, he craned his neck
over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then
very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over
the side.

‘Round,’ he whispered inaudibly.

The bomb flashed blinding scarlet in mid-air, and fell, a descending
column of blaze eddying spirally in the midst of a whirlwind. Both the
aeroplanes were tossed like shuttlecocks, hurled high and sideways and
the steersman, with gleaming eyes and set teeth, fought in great
banking curves for a balance. The gaunt man clung tight with hand and
knees; his nostrils dilated, his teeth biting his lips. He was firmly
strapped....

When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater
of a small volcano. In the open garden before the Imperial castle a
shuddering star of evil splendour spurted and poured up smoke and flame
towards them like an accusation. They were too high to distinguish
people clearly, or mark the bomb’s effect upon the building until
suddenly the facade tottered and crumbled before the flare as sugar
dissolves in water. The man stared for a moment, showed all his long
teeth, and then staggered into the cramped standing position his straps
permitted, hoisted out and bit another bomb, and sent it down after its
fellow.

The explosion came this time more directly underneath the aeroplane and
shot it upward edgeways. The bomb box tipped to the point of
disgorgement, and the bomb-thrower was pitched forward upon the third
bomb with his face close to its celluloid stud. He clutched its
handles, and with a sudden gust of determination that the thing should
not escape him, bit its stud. Before he could hurl it over, the
monoplane was slipping sideways. Everything was falling sideways.
Instinctively he gave himself up to gripping, his body holding the bomb
in its place.

Then that bomb had exploded also, and steersman, thrower, and aeroplane
were just flying rags and splinters of metal and drops of moisture in
the air, and a third column of fire rushed eddying down upon the doomed
buildings below....

Section 4

Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing
explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only
explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely
to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst
upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.
Those used by the Allies were lumps of pure Carolinum, painted on the
outside with unoxidised cydonator inducive enclosed hermetically in a
case of membranium. A little celluloid stud between the handles by
which the bomb was lifted was arranged so as to be easily torn off and
admit air to the inducive, which at once became active and set up
radio-activity in the outer layer of the Carolinum sphere. This
liberated fresh inducive, and so in a few minutes the whole bomb was a
blazing continual explosion. The Central European bombs were the same,
except that they were larger and had a more complicated arrangement for
animating the inducive.

Always before in the development of warfare the shells and rockets
fired had been but momentarily explosive, they had gone off in an
instant once for all, and if there was nothing living or valuable
within reach of the concussion and the flying fragments then they were
spent and over. But Carolinum, which belonged to the β-Group of
Hyslop’s so-called ‘suspended degenerator’ elements, once its
degenerative process had been induced, continued a furious radiation of
energy and nothing could arrest it. Of all Hyslop’s artificial
elements, Carolinum was the most heavily stored with energy and the
most dangerous to make and handle. To this day it remains the most
potent degenerator known. What the earlier twentieth-century chemists
called its half period was seventeen days; that is to say, it poured
out half of the huge store of energy in its great molecules in the
space of seventeen days, the next seventeen days’ emission was a half
of that first period’s outpouring, and so on. As with all radio-active
substances this Carolinum, though every seventeen days its power is
halved, though constantly it diminishes towards the imperceptible, is
never entirely exhausted, and to this day the battle-fields and bomb
fields of that frantic time in human history are sprinkled with radiant
matter, and so centres of inconvenient rays.

What happened when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive
oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to
degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of
the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly
an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus
wrapped in flame and thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes
fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and,
melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There,
as more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread itself
out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became
very speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum, unable to
disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of
molten soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously
and maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks
according to the size of the bomb employed and the chances of its
dispersal. Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and
uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the
crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and
fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum,
and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high
and far.

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate
explosive that was to give the ‘decisive touch’ to war....

Section 5

A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one
that ‘believed in established words and was invincibly blind to the
obvious in things.’ Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been
more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the
rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they
did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in
their fumbling hands. Yet the broad facts must have glared upon any
intelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually
increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a
blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no
increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive
defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered by
this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was
becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it
was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before
the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could
carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck
half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the
children in the streets knew them. And yet the world still, as the
Americans used to phrase it, ‘fooled around’ with the paraphernalia and
pretensions of war.

It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce between
the scientific and intellectual movement on the one hand, and the world
of the lawyer-politician on the other, that the men of a later time can
hope to understand this preposterous state of affairs. Social
organisation was still in the barbaric stage. There were already great
numbers of actively intelligent men and much private and commercial
civilisation, but the community, as a whole, was aimless, untrained and
unorganised to the pitch of imbecility. Collective civilisation, the
‘Modern State,’ was still in the womb of the future....

Section 6

But let us return to Frederick Barnet’s _Wander Jahre_ and its account
of the experiences of a common man during the war time. While these
terrific disclosures of scientific possibility were happening in Paris
and Berlin, Barnet and his company were industriously entrenching
themselves in Belgian Luxembourg.

He tells of the mobilisation and of his summer day’s journey through
the north of France and the Ardennes in a few vivid phrases. The
country was browned by a warm summer, the trees a little touched with
autumnal colour, and the wheat already golden. When they stopped for an
hour at Hirson, men and women with tricolour badges upon the platform
distributed cakes and glasses of beer to the thirsty soldiers, and
there was much cheerfulness. ‘Such good, cool beer it was,’ he wrote.
‘I had had nothing to eat nor drink since Epsom.’

A number of monoplanes, ‘like giant swallows,’ he notes, were scouting
in the pink evening sky.

Barnet’s battalion was sent through the Sedan country to a place called
Virton, and thence to a point in the woods on the line to Jemelle. Here
they detrained, bivouacked uneasily by the railway—trains and stores
were passing along it all night—and next morning he marched eastward
through a cold, overcast dawn, and a morning, first cloudy and then
blazing, over a large spacious country-side interspersed by forest
towards Arlon.

There the infantry were set to work upon a line of masked entrenchments
and hidden rifle pits between St Hubert and Virton that were designed
to check and delay any advance from the east upon the fortified line of
the Meuse. They had their orders, and for two days they worked without
either a sight of the enemy or any suspicion of the disaster that had
abruptly decapitated the armies of Europe, and turned the west of Paris
and the centre of Berlin into blazing miniatures of the destruction of
Pompeii.

And the news, when it did come, came attenuated. ‘We heard there had
been mischief with aeroplanes and bombs in Paris,’ Barnet relates; ‘but
it didn’t seem to follow that “They” weren’t still somewhere
elaborating their plans and issuing orders. When the enemy began to
emerge from the woods in front of us, we cheered and blazed away, and
didn’t trouble much more about anything but the battle in hand. If now
and then one cocked up an eye into the sky to see what was happening
there, the rip of a bullet soon brought one down to the horizontal
again....

That battle went on for three days all over a great stretch of country
between Louvain on the north and Longwy to the south. It was
essentially a rifle and infantry struggle. The aeroplanes do not seem
to have taken any decisive share in the actual fighting for some days,
though no doubt they effected the strategy from the first by preventing
surprise movements. They were aeroplanes with atomic engines, but they
were not provided with atomic bombs, which were manifestly unsuitable
for field use, nor indeed had they any very effective kind of bomb. And
though they manœuvred against each other, and there was rifle shooting
at them and between them, there was little actual aerial fighting.
Either the airmen were indisposed to fight or the commanders on both
sides preferred to reserve these machines for scouting....

After a day or so of digging and scheming, Barnet found himself in the
forefront of a battle. He had made his section of rifle pits chiefly
along a line of deep dry ditch that gave a means of
inter-communication, he had had the earth scattered over the adjacent
field, and he had masked his preparations with tussocks of corn and
poppy. The hostile advance came blindly and unsuspiciously across the
fields below and would have been very cruelly handled indeed, if some
one away to the right had not opened fire too soon.

‘It was a queer thrill when these fellows came into sight,’ he
confesses; ‘and not a bit like manœuvres. They halted for a time on the
edge of the wood and then came forward in an open line. They kept
walking nearer to us and not looking at us, but away to the right of
us. Even when they began to be hit, and their officers’ whistles woke
them up, they didn’t seem to see us. One or two halted to fire, and
then they all went back towards the wood again. They went slowly at
first, looking round at us, then the shelter of the wood seemed to draw
them, and they trotted. I fired rather mechanically and missed, then I
fired again, and then I became earnest to hit something, made sure of
my sighting, and aimed very carefully at a blue back that was dodging
about in the corn. At first I couldn’t satisfy myself and didn’t shoot,
his movements were so spasmodic and uncertain; then I think he came to
a ditch or some such obstacle and halted for a moment. “_Got_ you,” I
whispered, and pulled the trigger.

‘I had the strangest sensations about that man. In the first instance,
when I felt that I had hit him I was irradiated with joy and pride....

‘I sent him spinning. He jumped and threw up his arms....

‘Then I saw the corn tops waving and had glimpses of him flapping
about. Suddenly I felt sick. I hadn’t killed him....

‘In some way he was disabled and smashed up and yet able to struggle
about. I began to think....

‘For nearly two hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn. Either
he was calling out or some one was shouting to him....

‘Then he jumped up—he seemed to try to get up upon his feet with one
last effort; and then he fell like a sack and lay quite still and never
moved again.

‘He had been unendurable, and I believe some one had shot him dead. I
had been wanting to do so for some time....’

The enemy began sniping the rifle pits from shelters they made for
themselves in the woods below. A man was hit in the pit next to Barnet,
and began cursing and crying out in a violent rage. Barnet crawled
along the ditch to him and found him in great pain, covered with blood,
frantic with indignation, and with the half of his right hand smashed
to a pulp. ‘Look at this,’ he kept repeating, hugging it and then
extending it. ‘Damned foolery! Damned foolery! My right hand, sir! My
right hand!’

For some time Barnet could do nothing with him. The man was consumed by
his tortured realisation of the evil silliness of war, the realisation
which had come upon him in a flash with the bullet that had destroyed
his skill and use as an artificer for ever. He was looking at the
vestiges with a horror that made him impenetrable to any other idea. At
last the poor wretch let Barnet tie up his bleeding stump and help him
along the ditch that conducted him deviously out of range....

When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water, and
all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst. For food
they had chocolate and bread.

‘At first,’ he says, ‘I was extraordinarily excited by my baptism of
fire. Then as the heat of the day came on I experienced an enormous
tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely troublesome, and my
little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by ants. I could not get up or
move about, for some one in the trees had got a mark on me. I kept
thinking of the dead Prussian down among the corn, and of the bitter
outcries of my own man. Damned foolery! It _was_ damned foolery. But
who was to blame? How had we got to this? . . .

‘Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with dynamite
bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and suddenly dived
down over beyond the trees.

‘“From Holland to the Alps this day,” I thought, “there must be
crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to
inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic to
the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall wake up.”
. . .

‘Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. “Presently mankind will
wake up.”

‘I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were among
these hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in rebellion against
all these ancient traditions of flag and empire. Weren’t we, perhaps,
already in the throes of the last crisis, in that darkest moment of a
nightmare’s horror before the sleeper will endure no more of it—and
wakes?

‘I don’t know how my speculations ended. I think they were not so much
ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns that were
opening fire at long range upon Namur.’

Section 7

But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of
modern warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little shooting. The
bayonet attack by which the advanced line was broken was made at a
place called Croix Rouge, more than twenty miles away, and that night
under cover of the darkness the rifle pits were abandoned and he got
his company away without further loss.

His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines between
Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet, and was sent
northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem. Hence they marched into
North Holland. It was only after the march into Holland that he began
to realise the monstrous and catastrophic nature of the struggle in
which he was playing his undistinguished part.

He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and open
land of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine, and the
change from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the flat, rich
meadows, the sunlit dyke roads, and the countless windmills of the
Dutch levels. In those days there was unbroken land from Alkmaar and
Leiden to the Dollart. Three great provinces, South Holland, North
Holland, and Zuiderzeeland, reclaimed at various times between the
early tenth century and 1945 and all many feet below the level of the
waves outside the dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern
sun and sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of
laws and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a
perpetual defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two
hundred and fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a line of
embankments and pumping stations that was the admiration of the world.

If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in those
northern provinces while that flanking march of the British was in
progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate seat for his
observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds that were drifting
slowly across the blue sky during all these eventful days before the
great catastrophe. For that was the quality of the weather, hot and
clear, with something of a breeze, and underfoot dry and a little
inclined to be dusty. This watching god would have looked down upon
broad stretches of sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches
of shadow cast by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and
divided up by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon
white roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals.
The pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy traffic, of
beasts and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants’ automobiles, the hues
of the innumerable motor barges in the canal vied with the eventfulness
of the roadways; and everywhere in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and
barns, in groups by the wayside, in straggling villages, each with its
fine old church, or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in
bridges and clipped trees, were human habitations.

The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The interests
and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided that to the end she
remained undecided and passive in the struggle of the world powers. And
everywhere along the roads taken by the marching armies clustered
groups and crowds of impartially observant spectators, women and
children in peculiar white caps and old-fashioned sabots, and elderly,
clean-shaven men quietly thoughtful over their long pipes. They had no
fear of their invaders; the days when ‘soldiering’ meant bands of
licentious looters had long since passed away....

That watcher among the clouds would have seen a great distribution of
khaki-uniformed men and khaki-painted material over the whole of the
sunken area of Holland. He would have marked the long trains, packed
with men or piled with great guns and war material, creeping slowly,
alert for train-wreckers, along the north-going lines; he would have
seen the Scheldt and Rhine choked with shipping, and pouring out still
more men and still more material; he would have noticed halts and
provisionings and detrainments, and the long, bustling caterpillars of
cavalry and infantry, the maggot-like wagons, the huge beetles of great
guns, crawling under the poplars along the dykes and roads northward,
along ways lined by the neutral, unmolested, ambiguously observant
Dutch. All the barges and shipping upon the canals had been
requisitioned for transport. In that clear, bright, warm weather, it
would all have looked from above like some extravagant festival of
animated toys.

As the sun sank westward the spectacle must have become a little
indistinct because of a golden haze; everything must have become warmer
and more glowing, and because of the lengthening of the shadows more
manifestly in relief. The shadows of the tall churches grew longer and
longer, until they touched the horizon and mingled in the universal
shadow; and then, slow, and soft, and wrapping the world in fold after
fold of deepening blue, came the night—the night at first obscurely
simple, and then with faint points here and there, and then jewelled in
darkling splendour with a hundred thousand lights. Out of that mingling
of darkness and ambiguous glares the noise of an unceasing activity
would have arisen, the louder and plainer now because there was no
longer any distraction of sight.

It may be that watcher drifting in the pellucid gulf beneath the stars
watched all through the night; it may be that he dozed. But if he gave
way to so natural a proclivity, assuredly on the fourth night of the
great flank march he was aroused, for that was the night of the battle
in the air that decided the fate of Holland. The aeroplanes were
fighting at last, and suddenly about him, above and below, with cries
and uproar rushing out of the four quarters of heaven, striking,
plunging, oversetting, soaring to the zenith and dropping to the
ground, they came to assail or defend the myriads below.

Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying machines
together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a handful of ten
thousand knives over the low country. And amidst that swarming flight
were five that drove headlong for the sea walls of Holland, carrying
atomic bombs. From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose
in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war
in the air began. Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and
fell like archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth.
Surely the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy
pounding of your Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of
chariots, beside this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this
headlong swoop to death?

And then athwart this whirling rush of aerial duels that swooped and
locked and dropped in the void between the lamp-lights and the stars,
came a great wind and a crash louder than thunder, and first one and
then a score of lengthening fiery serpents plunged hungrily down upon
the Dutchmen’s dykes and struck between land and sea and flared up
again in enormous columns of glare and crimsoned smoke and steam.

And out of the darkness leapt the little land, with its spires and
trees, aghast with terror, still and distinct, and the sea, tumbled
with anger, red-foaming like a sea of blood....

Over the populous country below went a strange multitudinous crying and
a flurry of alarm bells....

The surviving aeroplanes turned about and fled out of the sky, like
things that suddenly know themselves to be wicked....

Through a dozen thunderously flaming gaps that no water might quench,
the waves came roaring in upon the land....

Section 8

‘We had cursed our luck,’ says Barnet, ‘that we could not get to our
quarters at Alkmaar that night. There, we were told, were provisions,
tobacco, and everything for which we craved. But the main canal from
Zaandam and Amsterdam was hopelessly jammed with craft, and we were
glad of a chance opening that enabled us to get out of the main column
and lie up in a kind of little harbour very much neglected and
weedgrown before a deserted house. We broke into this and found some
herrings in a barrel, a heap of cheeses, and stone bottles of gin in
the cellar; and with this I cheered my starving men. We made fires and
toasted the cheese and grilled our herrings. None of us had slept for
nearly forty hours, and I determined to stay in this refuge until dawn
and then if the traffic was still choked leave the barge and march the
rest of the way into Alkmaar.

‘This place we had got into was perhaps a hundred yards from the canal
and underneath a little brick bridge we could see the flotilla still,
and hear the voices of the soldiers. Presently five or six other barges
came through and lay up in the mere near by us, and with two of these,
full of men of the Antrim regiment, I shared my find of provisions. In
return we got tobacco. A large expanse of water spread to the westward
of us and beyond were a cluster of roofs and one or two church towers.
The barge was rather cramped for so many men, and I let several squads,
thirty or forty perhaps altogether, bivouac on the bank. I did not let
them go into the house on account of the furniture, and I left a note
of indebtedness for the food we had taken. We were particularly glad of
our tobacco and fires, because of the numerous mosquitoes that rose
about us.

‘The gate of the house from which we had provisioned ourselves was
adorned with the legend, _Vreugde bij Vrede_, “Joy with Peace,” and it
bore every mark of the busy retirement of a comfort-loving proprietor.
I went along his garden, which was gay and delightful with big bushes
of rose and sweet brier, to a quaint little summer-house, and there I
sat and watched the men in groups cooking and squatting along the bank.
The sun was setting in a nearly cloudless sky.

‘For the last two weeks I had been a wholly occupied man, intent only
upon obeying the orders that came down to me. All through this time I
had been working to the very limit of my mental and physical faculties,
and my only moments of rest had been devoted to snatches of sleep. Now
came this rare, unexpected interlude, and I could look detachedly upon
what I was doing and feel something of its infinite wonderfulness. I
was irradiated with affection for the men of my company and with
admiration at their cheerful acquiescence in the subordination and
needs of our positions. I watched their proceedings and heard their
pleasant voices. How willing those men were! How ready to accept
leadership and forget themselves in collective ends! I thought how
manfully they had gone through all the strains and toil of the last two
weeks, how they had toughened and shaken down to comradeship together,
and how much sweetness there is after all in our foolish human blood.
For they were just one casual sample of the species—their patience and
readiness lay, as the energy of the atom had lain, still waiting to be
properly utilised. Again it came to me with overpowering force that the
supreme need of our race is leading, that the supreme task is to
discover leading, to forget oneself in realising the collective purpose
of the race. Once more I saw life plain....’

Very characteristic is that of the ‘rather too corpulent’ young
officer, who was afterwards to set it all down in the _Wander Jahre_.
Very characteristic, too, it is of the change in men’s hearts that was
even then preparing a new phase of human history.

He goes on to write of the escape from individuality in science and
service, and of his discovery of this ‘salvation.’ All that was then,
no doubt, very moving and original; now it seems only the most obvious
commonplace of human life.

The glow of the sunset faded, the twilight deepened into night. The
fires burnt the brighter, and some Irishmen away across the mere
started singing. But Barnet’s men were too weary for that sort of
thing, and soon the bank and the barge were heaped with sleeping forms.

‘I alone seemed unable to sleep. I suppose I was over-weary, and after
a little feverish slumber by the tiller of the barge I sat up, awake
and uneasy....

‘That night Holland seemed all sky. There was just a little black lower
rim to things, a steeple, perhaps, or a line of poplars, and then the
great hemisphere swept over us. As at first the sky was empty. Yet my
uneasiness referred itself in some vague way to the sky.

‘And now I was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful and
submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so
far, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind
them to come upon this mad campaign, this campaign that signified
nothing and consumed everything, this mere fever of fighting. I saw how
little and feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances,
preposterously unable to find the will to realise even the most timid
of its dreams. And I wondered if always it would be so, if man was a
doomed animal who would never to the last days of his time take hold of
fate and change it to his will. Always, it may be, he will remain
kindly but jealous, desirous but discursive, able and unwisely
impulsive, until Saturn who begot him shall devour him in his turn....

‘I was roused from these thoughts by the sudden realisation of the
presence of a squadron of aeroplanes far away to the north-east and
very high. They looked like little black dashes against the midnight
blue. I remember that I looked up at them at first rather idly—as one
might notice a flight of birds. Then I perceived that they were only
the extreme wing of a great fleet that was advancing in a long line
very swiftly from the direction of the frontier and my attention
tightened.

‘Directly I saw that fleet I was astonished not to have seen it before.

‘I stood up softly, undesirous of disturbing my companions, but with my
heart beating now rather more rapidly with surprise and excitement. I
strained my ears for any sound of guns along our front. Almost
instinctively I turned about for protection to the south and west, and
peered; and then I saw coming as fast and much nearer to me, as if they
had sprung out of the darkness, three banks of aeroplanes; a group of
squadrons very high, a main body at a height perhaps of one or two
thousand feet, and a doubtful number flying low and very indistinct.
The middle ones were so thick they kept putting out groups of stars.
And I realised that after all there was to be fighting in the air.

‘There was something extraordinarily strange in this swift, noiseless
convergence of nearly invisible combatants above the sleeping hosts.
Every one about me was still unconscious; there was no sign as yet of
any agitation among the shipping on the main canal, whose whole course,
dotted with unsuspicious lights and fringed with fires, must have been
clearly perceptible from above. Then a long way off towards Alkmaar I
heard bugles, and after that shots, and then a wild clamour of bells. I
determined to let my men sleep on for as long as they could....

‘The battle was joined with the swiftness of dreaming. I do not think
it can have been five minutes from the moment when I first became aware
of the Central European air fleet to the contact of the two forces. I
saw it quite plainly in silhouette against the luminous blue of the
northern sky. The allied aeroplanes—they were mostly French—came
pouring down like a fierce shower upon the middle of the Central
European fleet. They looked exactly like a coarser sort of rain. There
was a crackling sound—the first sound I heard—it reminded one of the
Aurora Borealis, and I supposed it was an interchange of rifle shots.
There were flashes like summer lightning; and then all the sky became a
whirling confusion of battle that was still largely noiseless. Some of
the Central European aeroplanes were certainly charged and overset;
others seemed to collapse and fall and then flare out with so bright a
light that it took the edge off one’s vision and made the rest of the
battle disappear as though it had been snatched back out of sight.

‘And then, while I still peered and tried to shade these flames from my
eyes with my hand, and while the men about me were beginning to stir,
the atomic bombs were thrown at the dykes. They made a mighty thunder
in the air, and fell like Lucifer in the picture, leaving a flaring
trail in the sky. The night, which had been pellucid and detailed and
eventful, seemed to vanish, to be replaced abruptly by a black
background to these tremendous pillars of fire....

‘Hard upon the sound of them came a roaring wind, and the sky was
filled with flickering lightnings and rushing clouds....

‘There was something discontinuous in this impact. At one moment I was
a lonely watcher in a sleeping world; the next saw every one about me
afoot, the whole world awake and amazed....

‘And then the wind had struck me a buffet, taken my helmet and swept
aside the summerhouse of _Vreugde bij Vrede_, as a scythe sweeps away
grass. I saw the bombs fall, and then watched a great crimson flare
leap responsive to each impact, and mountainous masses of red-lit steam
and flying fragments clamber up towards the zenith. Against the glare I
saw the country-side for miles standing black and clear, churches,
trees, chimneys. And suddenly I understood. The Central Europeans had
burst the dykes. Those flares meant the bursting of the dykes, and in a
little while the sea-water would be upon us....’

He goes on to tell with a certain prolixity of the steps he took—and
all things considered they were very intelligent steps—to meet this
amazing crisis. He got his men aboard and hailed the adjacent barges;
he got the man who acted as barge engineer at his post and the engines
working, he cast loose from his moorings. Then he bethought himself of
food, and contrived to land five men, get in a few dozen cheeses, and
ship his men again before the inundation reached them.

He is reasonably proud of this piece of coolness. His idea was to take
the wave head-on and with his engines full speed ahead. And all the
while he was thanking heaven he was not in the jam of traffic in the
main canal. He rather, I think, overestimated the probable rush of
waters; he dreaded being swept away, he explains, and smashed against
houses and trees.

He does not give any estimate of the time it took between the bursting
of the dykes and the arrival of the waters, but it was probably an
interval of about twenty minutes or half an hour. He was working now in
darkness—save for the light of his lantern—and in a great wind. He hung
out head and stern lights....

Whirling torrents of steam were pouring up from the advancing waters,
which had rushed, it must be remembered, through nearly incandescent
gaps in the sea defences, and this vast uprush of vapour soon veiled
the flaring centres of explosion altogether.

‘The waters came at last, an advancing cascade. It was like a broad
roller sweeping across the country. They came with a deep, roaring
sound. I had expected a Niagara, but the total fall of the front could
not have been much more than twelve feet. Our barge hesitated for a
moment, took a dose over her bows, and then lifted. I signalled for
full speed ahead and brought her head upstream, and held on like grim
death to keep her there.

‘There was a wind about as strong as the flood, and I found we were
pounding against every conceivable buoyant object that had been between
us and the sea. The only light in the world now came from our lamps,
the steam became impenetrable at a score of yards from the boat, and
the roar of the wind and water cut us off from all remoter sounds. The
black, shining waters swirled by, coming into the light of our lamps
out of an ebony blackness and vanishing again into impenetrable black.
And on the waters came shapes, came things that flashed upon us for a
moment, now a half-submerged boat, now a cow, now a huge fragment of a
house’s timberings, now a muddle of packing-cases and scaffolding. The
things clapped into sight like something shown by the opening of a
shutter, and then bumped shatteringly against us or rushed by us. Once
I saw very clearly a man’s white face....

‘All the while a group of labouring, half-submerged trees remained
ahead of us, drawing very slowly nearer. I steered a course to avoid
them. They seemed to gesticulate a frantic despair against the black
steam clouds behind. Once a great branch detached itself and tore
shuddering by me. We did, on the whole, make headway. The last I saw of
_Vreugde bij Vrede_ before the night swallowed it, was almost dead
astern of us....’

Section 9

Morning found Barnet still afloat. The bows of his barge had been badly
strained, and his men were pumping or baling in relays. He had got
about a dozen half-drowned people aboard whose boat had capsized near
him, and he had three other boats in tow. He was afloat, and somewhere
between Amsterdam and Alkmaar, but he could not tell where. It was a
day that was still half night. Gray waters stretched in every direction
under a dark gray sky, and out of the waves rose the upper parts of
houses, in many cases ruined, the tops of trees, windmills, in fact the
upper third of all the familiar Dutch scenery; and on it there drifted
a dimly seen flotilla of barges, small boats, many overturned,
furniture, rafts, timbering, and miscellaneous objects.

The drowned were under water that morning. Only here and there did a
dead cow or a stiff figure still clinging stoutly to a box or chair or
such-like buoy hint at the hidden massacre. It was not till the
Thursday that the dead came to the surface in any quantity. The view
was bounded on every side by a gray mist that closed overhead in a gray
canopy. The air cleared in the afternoon, and then, far away to the
west under great banks of steam and dust, the flaming red eruption of
the atomic bombs came visible across the waste of water.

They showed flat and sullen through the mist, like London sunsets.
‘They sat upon the sea,’ says Barnet, ‘like frayed-out waterlilies of
flame.’

Barnet seems to have spent the morning in rescue work along the track
of the canal, in helping people who were adrift, in picking up derelict
boats, and in taking people out of imperilled houses. He found other
military barges similarly employed, and it was only as the day wore on
and the immediate appeals for aid were satisfied that he thought of
food and drink for his men, and what course he had better pursue. They
had a little cheese, but no water. ‘Orders,’ that mysterious direction,
had at last altogether disappeared. He perceived he had now to act upon
his own responsibility.

‘One’s sense was of a destruction so far-reaching and of a world so
altered that it seemed foolish to go in any direction and expect to
find things as they had been before the war began. I sat on the
quarter-deck with Mylius my engineer and Kemp and two others of the
non-commissioned officers, and we consulted upon our line of action. We
were foodless and aimless. We agreed that our fighting value was
extremely small, and that our first duty was to get ourselves in touch
with food and instructions again. Whatever plan of campaign had
directed our movements was manifestly smashed to bits. Mylius was of
opinion that we could take a line westward and get back to England
across the North Sea. He calculated that with such a motor barge as
ours it would be possible to reach the Yorkshire coast within
four-and-twenty hours. But this idea I overruled because of the
shortness of our provisions, and more particularly because of our
urgent need of water.

‘Every boat we drew near now hailed us for water, and their demands did
much to exasperate our thirst. I decided that if we went away to the
south we should reach hilly country, or at least country that was not
submerged, and then we should be able to land, find some stream, drink,
and get supplies and news. Many of the barges adrift in the haze about
us were filled with British soldiers and had floated up from the Nord
See Canal, but none of them were any better informed than ourselves of
the course of events. “Orders” had, in fact, vanished out of the sky.

‘“Orders” made a temporary reappearance late that evening in the form
of a megaphone hail from a British torpedo boat, announcing a truce,
and giving the welcome information that food and water were being
hurried down the Rhine and were to be found on the barge flotilla lying
over the old Rhine above Leiden.’...

We will not follow Barnet, however, in the description of his strange
overland voyage among trees and houses and churches by Zaandam and
between Haarlem and Amsterdam, to Leiden. It was a voyage in a red-lit
mist, in a world of steamy silhouette, full of strange voices and
perplexity, and with every other sensation dominated by a feverish
thirst. ‘We sat,’ he says, ‘in a little huddled group, saying very
little, and the men forward were mere knots of silent endurance. Our
only continuing sound was the persistent mewing of a cat one of the men
had rescued from a floating hayrick near Zaandam. We kept a southward
course by a watch-chain compass Mylius had produced....

‘I do not think any of us felt we belonged to a defeated army, nor had
we any strong sense of the war as the dominating fact about us. Our
mental setting had far more of the effect of a huge natural
catastrophe. The atomic bombs had dwarfed the international issues to
complete insignificance. When our minds wandered from the
preoccupations of our immediate needs, we speculated upon the
possibility of stopping the use of these frightful explosives before
the world was utterly destroyed. For to us it seemed quite plain that
these bombs and the still greater power of destruction of which they
were the precursors might quite easily shatter every relationship and
institution of mankind.

‘“What will they be doing,” asked Mylius, “what will they be doing?
It’s plain we’ve got to put an end to war. It’s plain things have to be
run some way. _This_—all this—is impossible.”

‘I made no immediate answer. Something—I cannot think what—had brought
back to me the figure of that man I had seen wounded on the very first
day of actual fighting. I saw again his angry, tearful eyes, and that
poor, dripping, bloody mess that had been a skilful human hand five
minutes before, thrust out in indignant protest. “Damned foolery,” he
had stormed and sobbed, “damned foolery. My right hand, sir! My _right_
hand. . . .”

‘My faith had for a time gone altogether out of me. “I think we are
too—too silly,” I said to Mylius, “ever to stop war. If we’d had the
sense to do it, we should have done it before this. I think this——” I
pointed to the gaunt black outline of a smashed windmill that stuck up,
ridiculous and ugly, above the blood-lit waters—“this is the end.”’

Section 10

But now our history must part company with Frederick Barnet and his
barge-load of hungry and starving men.

For a time in western Europe at least it was indeed as if civilisation
had come to a final collapse. These crowning buds upon the tradition
that Napoleon planted and Bismarck watered, opened and flared ‘like
waterlilies of flame’ over nations destroyed, over churches smashed or
submerged, towns ruined, fields lost to mankind for ever, and a million
weltering bodies. Was this lesson enough for mankind, or would the
flames of war still burn amidst the ruins?

Neither Barnet nor his companions, it is clear, had any assurance in
their answers to that question. Already once in the history of mankind,
in America, before its discovery by the whites, an organised
civilisation had given way to a mere cult of warfare, specialised and
cruel, and it seemed for a time to many a thoughtful man as if the
whole world was but to repeat on a larger scale this ascendancy of the
warrior, this triumph of the destructive instincts of the race.

The subsequent chapters of Barnet’s narrative do but supply body to
this tragic possibility. He gives a series of vignettes of
civilisation, shattered, it seemed, almost irreparably. He found the
Belgian hills swarming with refugees and desolated by cholera; the
vestiges of the contending armies keeping order under a truce, without
actual battles, but with the cautious hostility of habit, and a great
absence of plan everywhere.

Overhead aeroplanes went on mysterious errands, and there were rumours
of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy
and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes. There was the report of
an attack upon Russia by the Chinese and Japanese, and of some huge
revolutionary outbreak in America. The weather was stormier than men
had ever known it in those regions, with much thunder and lightning and
wild cloud-bursts of rain....




CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENDING OF WAR


Section 1

On the mountain-side above the town of Brissago and commanding two long
stretches of Lake Maggiore, looking eastward to Bellinzona, and
southward to Luino, there is a shelf of grass meadows which is very
beautiful in springtime with a great multitude of wild flowers. More
particularly is this so in early June, when the slender asphodel Saint
Bruno’s lily, with its spike of white blossom, is in flower. To the
westward of this delightful shelf there is a deep and densely wooded
trench, a great gulf of blue some mile or so in width out of which
arise great precipices very high and wild. Above the asphodel fields
the mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and sunlight
that curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one common skyline.
This desolate and austere background contrasts very vividly with the
glowing serenity of the great lake below, with the spacious view of
fertile hills and roads and villages and islands to south and east, and
with the hotly golden rice flats of the Val Maggia to the north. And
because it was a remote and insignificant place, far away out of the
crowding tragedies of that year of disaster, away from burning cities
and starving multitudes, bracing and tranquillising and hidden, it was
here that there gathered the conference of rulers that was to arrest,
if possible, before it was too late, the _débâcle_ of civilisation.
Here, brought together by the indefatigable energy of that impassioned
humanitarian, Leblanc, the French ambassador at Washington, the chief
Powers of the world were to meet in a last desperate conference to
‘save humanity.’

Leblanc was one of those ingenuous men whose lot would have been
insignificant in any period of security, but who have been caught up to
an immortal _rôle_ in history by the sudden simplification of human
affairs through some tragical crisis, to the measure of their
simplicity. Such a man was Abraham Lincoln, and such was Garibaldi. And
Leblanc, with his transparent childish innocence, his entire
self-forgetfulness, came into this confusion of distrust and intricate
disaster with an invincible appeal for the manifest sanities of the
situation. His voice, when he spoke, was ‘full of remonstrance.’ He was
a little bald, spectacled man, inspired by that intellectual idealism
which has been one of the peculiar gifts of France to humanity. He was
possessed of one clear persuasion, that war must end, and that the only
way to end war was to have but one government for mankind. He brushed
aside all other considerations. At the very outbreak of the war, so
soon as the two capitals of the belligerents had been wrecked, he went
to the president in the White House with this proposal. He made it as
if it was a matter of course. He was fortunate to be in Washington and
in touch with that gigantic childishness which was the characteristic
of the American imagination. For the Americans also were among the
simple peoples by whom the world was saved. He won over the American
president and the American government to his general ideas; at any rate
they supported him sufficiently to give him a standing with the more
sceptical European governments, and with this backing he set to work—it
seemed the most fantastic of enterprises—to bring together all the
rulers of the world and unify them. He wrote innumerable letters, he
sent messages, he went desperate journeys, he enlisted whatever support
he could find; no one was too humble for an ally or too obstinate for
his advances; through the terrible autumn of the last wars this
persistent little visionary in spectacles must have seemed rather like
a hopeful canary twittering during a thunderstorm. And no accumulation
of disasters daunted his conviction that they could be ended.

For the whole world was flaring then into a monstrous phase of
destruction. Power after Power about the armed globe sought to
anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of
panic, in order to use their bombs first. China and Japan had assailed
Russia and destroyed Moscow, the United States had attacked Japan,
India was in anarchistic revolt with Delhi a pit of fire spouting death
and flame; the redoubtable King of the Balkans was mobilising. It must
have seemed plain at last to every one in those days that the world was
slipping headlong to anarchy. By the spring of 1959 from nearly two
hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the
unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs, the flimsy
fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely
disorganised and every city, every thickly populated area was starving
or trembled on the verge of starvation. Most of the capital cities of
the world were burning; millions of people had already perished, and
over great areas government was at an end. Humanity has been compared
by one contemporary writer to a sleeper who handles matches in his
sleep and wakes to find himself in flames.

For many months it was an open question whether there was to be found
throughout all the race the will and intelligence to face these new
conditions and make even an attempt to arrest the downfall of the
social order. For a time the war spirit defeated every effort to rally
the forces of preservation and construction. Leblanc seemed to be
protesting against earthquakes, and as likely to find a spirit of
reason in the crater of Etna. Even though the shattered official
governments now clamoured for peace, bands of irreconcilables and
invincible patriots, usurpers, adventurers, and political desperadoes,
were everywhere in possession of the simple apparatus for the
disengagement of atomic energy and the initiation of new centres of
destruction. The stuff exercised an irresistible fascination upon a
certain type of mind. Why should any one give in while he can still
destroy his enemies? Surrender? While there is still a chance of
blowing them to dust? The power of destruction which had once been the
ultimate privilege of government was now the only power left in the
world—and it was everywhere. There were few thoughtful men during that
phase of blazing waste who did not pass through such moods of despair
as Barnet describes, and declare with him: ‘This is the end....’

And all the while Leblanc was going to and fro with glittering glasses
and an inexhaustible persuasiveness, urging the manifest reasonableness
of his view upon ears that ceased presently to be inattentive. Never at
any time did he betray a doubt that all this chaotic conflict would
end. No nurse during a nursery uproar was ever so certain of the
inevitable ultimate peace. From being treated as an amiable dreamer he
came by insensible degrees to be regarded as an extravagant
possibility. Then he began to seem even practicable. The people who
listened to him in 1958 with a smiling impatience, were eager before
1959 was four months old to know just exactly what he thought might be
done. He answered with the patience of a philosopher and the lucidity
of a Frenchman. He began to receive responses of a more and more
hopeful type. He came across the Atlantic to Italy, and there he
gathered in the promises for this congress. He chose those high meadows
above Brissago for the reasons we have stated. ‘We must get away,’ he
said, ‘from old associations.’ He set to work requisitioning material
for his conference with an assurance that was justified by the replies.
With a slight incredulity the conference which was to begin a new order
in the world, gathered itself together. Leblanc summoned it without
arrogance, he controlled it by virtue of an infinite humility. Men
appeared upon those upland slopes with the apparatus for wireless
telegraphy; others followed with tents and provisions; a little cable
was flung down to a convenient point upon the Locarno road below.
Leblanc arrived, sedulously directing every detail that would affect
the tone of the assembly. He might have been a courier in advance
rather than the originator of the gathering. And then there arrived,
some by the cable, most by aeroplane, a few in other fashions, the men
who had been called together to confer upon the state of the world. It
was to be a conference without a name. Nine monarchs, the presidents of
four republics, a number of ministers and ambassadors, powerful
journalists, and such-like prominent and influential men, took part in
it. There were even scientific men; and that world-famous old man,
Holsten, came with the others to contribute his amateur statecraft to
the desperate problem of the age. Only Leblanc would have dared so to
summon figure heads and powers and intelligence, or have had the
courage to hope for their agreement....

Section 2

And one at least of those who were called to this conference of
governments came to it on foot. This was King Egbert, the young king of
the most venerable kingdom in Europe. He was a rebel, and had always
been of deliberate choice a rebel against the magnificence of his
position. He affected long pedestrian tours and a disposition to sleep
in the open air. He came now over the Pass of Sta Maria Maggiore and by
boat up the lake to Brissago; thence he walked up the mountain, a
pleasant path set with oaks and sweet chestnut. For provision on the
walk, for he did not want to hurry, he carried with him a pocketful of
bread and cheese. A certain small retinue that was necessary to his
comfort and dignity upon occasions of state he sent on by the cable
car, and with him walked his private secretary, Firmin, a man who had
thrown up the Professorship of World Politics in the London School of
Sociology, Economics, and Political Science, to take up these duties.
Firmin was a man of strong rather than rapid thought, he had
anticipated great influence in this new position, and after some years
he was still only beginning to apprehend how largely his function was
to listen. Originally he had been something of a thinker upon
international politics, an authority upon tariffs and strategy, and a
valued contributor to various of the higher organs of public opinion,
but the atomic bombs had taken him by surprise, and he had still to
recover completely from his pre-atomic opinions and the silencing
effect of those sustained explosives.

The king’s freedom from the trammels of etiquette was very complete. In
theory—and he abounded in theory—his manners were purely democratic. It
was by sheer habit and inadvertency that he permitted Firmin, who had
discovered a rucksack in a small shop in the town below, to carry both
bottles of beer. The king had never, as a matter of fact, carried
anything for himself in his life, and he had never noted that he did
not do so.

‘We will have nobody with us,’ he said, ‘at all. We will be perfectly
simple.’

So Firmin carried the beer.

As they walked up—it was the king made the pace rather than Firmin—they
talked of the conference before them, and Firmin, with a certain want
of assurance that would have surprised him in himself in the days of
his Professorship, sought to define the policy of his companion. ‘In
its broader form, sir,’ said Firmin; ‘I admit a certain plausibility in
this project of Leblanc’s, but I feel that although it may be advisable
to set up some sort of general control for International affairs—a sort
of Hague Court with extended powers—that is no reason whatever for
losing sight of the principles of national and imperial autonomy.’

‘Firmin,’ said the king, ‘I am going to set my brother kings a good
example.’

Firmin intimated a curiosity that veiled a dread.

‘By chucking all that nonsense,’ said the king.

He quickened his pace as Firmin, who was already a little out of
breath, betrayed a disposition to reply.

‘I am going to chuck all that nonsense,’ said the king, as Firmin
prepared to speak. ‘I am going to fling my royalty and empire on the
table—and declare at once I don’t mean to haggle. It’s haggling—about
rights—has been the devil in human affairs, for—always. I am going to
stop this nonsense.’

Firmin halted abruptly. ‘But, sir!’ he cried.

The king stopped six yards ahead of him and looked back at his
adviser’s perspiring visage.

‘Do you really think, Firmin, that I am here as—as an infernal
politician to put my crown and my flag and my claims and so forth in
the way of peace? That little Frenchman is right. You know he is right
as well as I do. Those things are over. We—we kings and rulers and
representatives have been at the very heart of the mischief. Of course
we imply separation, and of course separation means the threat of war,
and of course the threat of war means the accumulation of more and more
atomic bombs. The old game’s up. But, I say, we mustn’t stand here, you
know. The world waits. Don’t you think the old game’s up, Firmin?’

Firmin adjusted a strap, passed a hand over his wet forehead, and
followed earnestly. ‘I admit, sir,’ he said to a receding back, ‘that
there has to be some sort of hegemony, some sort of Amphictyonic
council——’

‘There’s got to be one simple government for all the world,’ said the
king over his shoulder.

‘But as for a reckless, unqualified abandonment, sir——’

‘_Bang!_’ cried the king.

Firmin made no answer to this interruption. But a faint shadow of
annoyance passed across his heated features.

‘Yesterday,’ said the king, by way of explanation, ‘the Japanese very
nearly got San Francisco.’

‘I hadn’t heard, sir.’

‘The Americans ran the Japanese aeroplane down into the sea and there
the bomb got busted.’

‘Under the sea, sir?’

‘Yes. Submarine volcano. The steam is in sight of the Californian
coast. It was as near as that. And with things like this happening, you
want me to go up this hill and haggle. Consider the effect of that upon
my imperial cousin—and all the others!’

‘_He_ will haggle, sir.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ said the king.

‘But, sir.’

‘Leblanc won’t let him.’

Firmin halted abruptly and gave a vicious pull at the offending strap.
‘Sir, he will listen to his advisers,’ he said, in a tone that in some
subtle way seemed to implicate his master with the trouble of the
knapsack.

The king considered him.

‘We will go just a little higher,’ he said. ‘I want to find this
unoccupied village they spoke of, and then we will drink that beer. It
can’t be far. We will drink the beer and throw away the bottles. And
then, Firmin, I shall ask you to look at things in a more generous
light.... Because, you know, you must....’

He turned about and for some time the only sound they made was the
noise of their boots upon the loose stones of the way and the irregular
breathing of Firmin.

At length, as it seemed to Firmin, or quite soon, as it seemed to the
king, the gradient of the path diminished, the way widened out, and
they found themselves in a very beautiful place indeed. It was one of
those upland clusters of sheds and houses that are still to be found in
the mountains of North Italy, buildings that were used only in the high
summer, and which it was the custom to leave locked up and deserted
through all the winter and spring, and up to the middle of June. The
buildings were of a soft-toned gray stone, buried in rich green grass,
shadowed by chestnut trees and lit by an extraordinary blaze of yellow
broom. Never had the king seen broom so glorious; he shouted at the
light of it, for it seemed to give out more sunlight even than it
received; he sat down impulsively on a lichenous stone, tugged out his
bread and cheese, and bade Firmin thrust the beer into the shaded weeds
to cool.

‘The things people miss, Firmin,’ he said, ‘who go up into the air in
ships!’

Firmin looked around him with an ungenial eye. ‘You see it at its best,
sir,’ he said, ‘before the peasants come here again and make it
filthy.’

‘It would be beautiful anyhow,’ said the king.

‘Superficially, sir,’ said Firmin. ‘But it stands for a social order
that is fast vanishing away. Indeed, judging by the grass between the
stones and in the huts, I am inclined to doubt if it is in use even
now.’

‘I suppose,’ said the king, ‘they would come up immediately the hay on
this flower meadow is cut. It would be those slow, creamy-coloured
beasts, I expect, one sees on the roads below, and swarthy girls with
red handkerchiefs over their black hair.... It is wonderful to think
how long that beautiful old life lasted. In the Roman times and long
ages before ever the rumour of the Romans had come into these parts,
men drove their cattle up into these places as the summer came on....
How haunted is this place! There have been quarrels here, hopes,
children have played here and lived to be old crones and old gaffers,
and died, and so it has gone on for thousands of lives. Lovers,
innumerable lovers, have caressed amidst this golden broom....’

He meditated over a busy mouthful of bread and cheese.

‘We ought to have brought a tankard for that beer,’ he said.

Firmin produced a folding aluminium cup, and the king was pleased to
drink.

‘I wish, sir,’ said Firmin suddenly, ‘I could induce you at least to
delay your decision——’

‘It’s no good talking, Firmin,’ said the king. ‘My mind’s as clear as
daylight.’

‘Sire,’ protested Firmin, with his voice full of bread and cheese and
genuine emotion, ‘have you no respect for your kingship?’

The king paused before he answered with unwonted gravity. ‘It’s just
because I have, Firmin, that I won’t be a puppet in this game of
international politics.’ He regarded his companion for a moment and
then remarked: ‘Kingship!—what do _you_ know of kingship, Firmin?

‘Yes,’ cried the king to his astonished counsellor. ‘For the first time
in my life I am going to be a king. I am going to lead, and lead by my
own authority. For a dozen generations my family has been a set of
dummies in the hands of their advisers. Advisers! Now I am going to be
a real king—and I am going to—to abolish, dispose of, finish, the crown
to which I have been a slave. But what a world of paralysing shams this
roaring stuff has ended! The rigid old world is in the melting-pot
again, and I, who seemed to be no more than the stuffing inside a regal
robe, I am a king among kings. I have to play my part at the head of
things and put an end to blood and fire and idiot disorder.’

‘But, sir,’ protested Firmin.

‘This man Leblanc is right. The whole world has got to be a Republic,
one and indivisible. You know that, and my duty is to make that easy. A
king should lead his people; you want me to stick on their backs like
some Old Man of the Sea. To-day must be a sacrament of kings. Our trust
for mankind is done with and ended. We must part our robes among them,
we must part our kingship among them, and say to them all, now the king
in every one must rule the world.... Have you no sense of the
magnificence of this occasion? You want me, Firmin, you want me to go
up there and haggle like a damned little solicitor for some price, some
compensation, some qualification....’

Firmin shrugged his shoulders and assumed an expression of despair.
Meanwhile, he conveyed, one must eat.

For a time neither spoke, and the king ate and turned over in his mind
the phrases of the speech he intended to make to the conference. By
virtue of the antiquity of his crown he was to preside, and he intended
to make his presidency memorable. Reassured of his eloquence, he
considered the despondent and sulky Firmin for a space.

‘Firmin,’ he said, ‘you have idealised kingship.’

‘It has been my dream, sir,’ said Firmin sorrowfully, ‘to serve.’

‘At the levers, Firmin,’ said the king.

‘You are pleased to 

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